The George Grant Reader

Edited by William Christian and Sheila Grant

Called the most forceful voice of philosophic radicalism that Canada

has so far produced, George Grant was a prolific writer, engaged by
subjects ranging from Canadian politics to ancient philosophy. The
George Grant Reader is the first book to bring together in one volume a
comprehensive selection of his work, allowing readers to sample the
whole range of his interests.
The reader includes selections from all phases of Grant's career,
beginning with The Empire: Yes or No? (1945) and ending with an article
on Heidegger, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1988. Forty-six
essays, grouped into six sections, encompass his views on politics,
morality, philosophy, education, technology, faith, and love. Also fea-
tured are Grant's writings on those who most influenced his thought,
ranging from St Augustine to Karl Marx and Simone Weil. A number
of his more disturbing essays are also included, such as his controver-
sial writings on abortion. The editors' substantial introduction places
the articles in the wider context of Grant's life and thought.
This long-overdue collection contains classic works, little-known
masterpieces, and previously unpublished material. The volume is an
ideal starting point for those who have never read Grant as well as an
indispensable reference for Grant specialists.

W I L L I A M C H R I S T I A N is Professor of Political Studies at the University

of Guelph. He is author of George Grant: A Biography and editor of
George Grant: Selected Letters.

SH El LA G R A N T was married to George Grant for forty-one years and is

a graduate in English language and literature from Oxford University.
This page intentionally left blank
 The
George Grant
Reader

Edited by
WILLIAM CHRISTIAN
and
SHEILA GRANT

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto London Buffalo
 www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1998
Toronto Buffalo London

Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-0973-5 (cloth)

ISBN 0-8020-7934-2 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Grant, George, 1918-1988

The George Grant reader

ISBN 0-8020-0973-5 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7934-2 (pbk.)

1. Philosophy. 2. Political science. 3. Canada - Politics
and government. I. Christian, William, 1945-
II. Grant, Sheila, 1920-

B995.G74A4 1998 191 C97-931550-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance

to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3

PROLOGUE: What Is Philosophy? (1954) 33

1 POLITICS AND MORALITY 41

THE CHARACTER OF CANADA
The Empire: Yes or No? (1945) 43
MASS SOCIETY
The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age (1955) 51
EQUALITY AND THE NDP
An Ethic of Community (1961) 59
CANADA AND NATIONALISM
Lament for a Nation (1965) 76
THE VIETNAM WAR
A Critique of the New Left (1966) 84
The Value of Protest (1966) 90
THE UNITED STATES AS A TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
The Great Society (1967) 95
PIERRE TRUDEAU
Nationalism and Rationality (1971) 103
JUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO LIFE
English-Speaking Justice (1974) 108
vi Contents

CANADA AND QUEBEC

On National Unity (1977) 125
CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
John Stuart Mill (1977) 129
CONSERVATISM
A Democrat in Theory and in Soul (1979) 134
BRITISH CONSERVATISM
Benjamin Disraeli (1982) 138
LIBERALISM AND TYRANNY
The Triumph of the Will (1988) 142
FREE TRADE
The Fate of the Willing (1988) 151

2 PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION 155

PHILOSOPHY AND THE PERFECTION OF GOD
Philosophy (1951) 157
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION
The Paradox of Democratic Education (1955) 174
RESIGNATION FROM YORK
Letter of Resignation (1960) 188
THE MULTIVERSITY
The University Curriculum (1975) 191
RESEARCH AND RESIGNATION
The Battle between Teaching and Research (1980) 200

3 THINKING THEIR THOUGHTS 205

PLATO
Introduction to Plato (1973) 207
Plato and Augustine (1952) 210
ST AUGUSTINE
Charles Cochrane (1954) 214
The Moving Image of Eternity (1986) 218
IMMANUEL KANT
Kant and the Separation of Good and Necessity 219
George Grant to Simone Petrement (1975) 222
 Contents vii

Lecture (1977/8) 223

Lecture (1977/8) 223
KARL MARX
Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) 226
SIMONE WEIL
Introduction to Simone Weil (1970) 238
Petrement's Simone Weil (1977) 254
In Defence of Simone Weil (1988) 256
LEO STRAUSS AND ALEXANDRE KOJEVE
Tyranny and Wisdom (1964) 267
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Time as History (1969) 280
Nietzsche's View of Socrates (1977) 290
Nietzsche and the Ancients (1979) 293
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Interview on Martin Heidegger (1986) 300
Confronting Heidegger's Nietzsche (1988) 303
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Why Read Rousseau? (1981) 311

4 GEORGE GRANT ON ... : REVIEWS AND ESSAYS 319

FRANCIS BACON
The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1948) 321
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Pursuit of an Illusion (1952) 323
SIGMUND FREUD
Conceptions of Health (1962) 335
CARL GUSTAVJUNG
Carl Gustav Jung (1962) 345
HAROLD ADAMS INNIS
The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis (1980) 355
NORTHROP FRYE
The Great Code (1982) 357
DENNIS LEE
Dennis Lee - Poetry and Philosophy (1982) 361
viii Contents

LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE
Celine: Art and Politics (1983) 369

5 TECHNOLOGY AND MODERNITY 385

THE GOOD OR VALUES?
Value and Technology (1964) 387
THE CIVILIZATION OF TECHNIQUE
The Technological Society (1966) 394
AMERICA: A NEW WORLD
In Defence of North America (1969) 399
TECHNOLOGY AS WARNING
Knowing and Making (1975) 407
TECHNOLOGYAS ONTOLOGY
The Computer Does Not Impose on Us the Ways It Should Be Used
(1976) 418
TECHNOLOGY AND FAITH
Justice and Technology (1984) 435

6 THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD 445

THE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS
Good Friday (1952) 447
INTIMATIONS OF DEPRIVAL
A Platitude (1969) 448
DEATH AS ABSENCE
Jelte Kuipers - An Appreciation (1970) 453
THE ABSENCE OF JUSTICE
Torture (1977) 456
BLISS
Foreword to Neo-Vedanta and Modernity (1983) 460
LOVE
Faith and the Multiversity (1986) 461

Index 483
 Acknowledgments

It has been pleasant to work with generous and cooperative people

while preparing this reader. Dr Ron Schoeffel, editor-in-chief of the
University of Toronto Press, actively supported the idea from the very
beginning. Mark Haslett of the University of Waterloo helped with
some hard-to-fmd material. Kim Groenendyk brought her scholarly
training and typing skills to the formidable task of inputting the text
into the word processor. Matthew Christian of Toronto prepared the
Index. Jay Newman and Jim Geary of the philosophy department of
the University of Guelph were kind enough to read the introduction
and to give us their thoughts, as was Nita Graham of Halifax. Louis
Greenspan, a long-time friend and colleague of Grant at McMaster,
gave us his advice on the whole text and his suggestions made it stron-
ger. An anonymous University of Toronto Press reviewer provided us
with reams of detailed corrections and improvements. We are grateful
to his keen eye and thankful for his generosity. We also thank the fol-
lowing for permission to reprint material: University of Toronto Press
for selections from Time as History and Philosophy in the Mass Age', House
of Anansi and Stoddart for selections from Technology and Empire,
English-Speaking Justice, and Technology and Justice; Carleton University
Press for Lament for a Nation; the Privy Council Office, Government of
Canada, for 'Philosophy;' the Queen's Quarterly for 'Celine - Art and
Polities'; and the Dalhousie Review for the review of The Philosophy of
Francis Bacon and 'Pursuit of an Illusion.'
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THE GEORGE GRANT READER
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Life

George Parkin Grant was born in Toronto on 13 November 1918, two

days after the armistice. His father, William Grant, was principal of
Upper Canada College, a private boys' school. He had previously
taught history at Oxford and at Queen's University in Kingston,
Ontario, before enlisting as an officer in the First World War and serv-
ing overseas. In his thirties, William Grant had courted and, in 1911,
married Maude Parkin, whom Eugene Forsey described as someone
who 'could have run the whole British Empire at the height of its
power single-handed.'1 Maude was a woman of great strength and sur-
passing charm. George's three elder sisters — Margaret, Charity, and
Alison - were each powerful personalities, and it was always rather
hard for George to understand why women had ever been called the
weaker sex.
In later life, Grant regretted that he had attended a school where his
father was principal, since he thought that the other boys saw him as a
sort of spy, but his undergraduate studies in history at Queen's were
happier. Even there, however, he felt that he was known as his
mother's son or the grandson of the legendary George Monro Grant,
Queen's most famous principal. Still more oppressive was the influ-
ence of his other grandfather, George Parkin, the founding secretary
of the Rhodes Scholarship trust. Maude Grant idolized her father and
the younger George felt under tremendous pressure to be a worldly
success in the mould of his grandfathers.
In 1939 Grant won a Rhodes scholarship and set out for Oxford to
study law at the start of the Second World War. He completed his first
4 Introduction

year of study but felt increasingly guilty in the aloof comfort of Oxford.
Though a pacifist, he decided to remain in England and, in the sum-
mer of 1940, joined an ambulance unit. When the Battle of Britain
started, he became an air raid precautions warden in Bermondsey in
the east end of London, one of the most heavily bombed parts of the
capital. It is an understatement to say that it was during this period that
he grew up. His life of privilege was over.
The gruelling experience of violence and death broke him forever
from the comfortable liberalism in which he had been raised. It also
destroyed his health. The nightly bombing stopped when the Germans
invaded Russia. Under enormous pressure from his family and friends
to do his duty to king and country, he attempted to join the merchant
marine, although this compromised his pacifist principles. He was
turned down because the medical examination revealed signs of tuber-
culosis. Not waiting for a formal discharge, he ran away and worked on
a farm, saying later that it was a way to be left alone and also to get food
(since he was without a ration book). It was at this point, in December
1941, while bicycling to work one morning, that he experienced a sud-
den total conviction that beyond the chaos of the world there was
eternal order, that God existed, and that we are not our own. This cer-
tainty lasted all his life.
After being nursed back to health in Toronto, he spent two years
working for the Canadian Association for Adult Education. This job
involved much travelling across Canada, writing, and speaking. The
experience proved a useful preparation for his later career as a univer-
sity teacher, and he probably owed to it much of his ease in writing and
speaking to the public, and perhaps also something of his powerful
radio personality. (The selection with which this reader begins, a radio
talk on philosophy, exemplifies his skill at clarifying complicated issues
for a mass audience.)
After the war, he returned to Oxford, but he had decided not to
pursue a legal career. He wanted instead to explore the implications of
his religious experience and to find out more about Christianity. The
master of Balliol College, A.D. Lindsay, suggested that he write a DPhil
thesis on the philosophy of a Scottish Presbyterian theologian, John
Oman. Grant had never heard of Oman and his lack of enthusiasm for
his subject probably accounts for the small progress he made on his
thesis. However, he threw himself into reading Plato, St Augustine,
and other philosophers. After two years in Oxford, he married Sheila
Allen, a student of English literature and a fellow pacifist, who had also
 Introduction 5

resumed her university education after spending the war as a nurse.

Together they set out for Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
where Grant had been hired to teach philosophy.
His years in Halifax (1947-60) transformed him. As he explained to
a former student, he was learning to be a philosopher at the same time
as he was teaching philosophy:

Not being a person who would naturally (whatever that means) have
turned to speculation - that is having been driven to it - I am simply flab-
bergasted at where philosophy has taken me. Just not at all the sort of
course I expected. It is like setting out on what one expected to be a jaunt
across the Arm 2 - finding oneself shipwrecked time after time and yet
knowing one has no alternative but to go on - moods of dereliction -
moods of amusement and moments of joy - but above all sheer unadul-
terated amazement. I just could have expected anything of life, but not
this. Above all the dereliction is when philosophy is in direct conflict with
ambition. For a variety of reasons my adolescence was taken up by the
idea of fame as the summum bonurrt and it is really shattering to me to
have to face it for what it is.4

During this time at Dalhousie, he and Sheila had six children, three
girls and three boys, and Grant made many lasting friendships. As well
as his formal teaching, Grant continued to be active in adult educa-
tion. He gave numerous speeches to teachers, delivered papers at all
kinds of gatherings, and spoke on many radio programs (which had
the added advantage of helping to supplement his meager academic
salary.) After their third child was born, the Grants acquired a second-
hand car and life became a little easier. Grant found Nova Scotian stu-
dents wonderfully open to thought. They had not been 'wised up' at
high school, and so they did not have to unlearn a lot of progressive
modern dogma.
By 1958 Canada's economy was booming and Grant was still weigh-
ing the character of the progressive society that was forming. James
Doull, a learned friend and colleague, had taught him how to under-
stand Plato and was leading him through the maze of Hegel's thought.
The good students he encountered also gave him reason to hope for a
better future. This optimism was apparent in Philosophy in the Mass Age,
originally presented as a series of radio lectures for the CBC's first Uni-
versity of the Air, the predecessor of the program Ideas. Philosophy in the
Mass Age was an immediate and immense success.
6 Introduction

By the end of the 1950s Grant was eager for a change. He accepted an
offer to head the philosophy department at the newly founded York
University in Toronto, but he resigned before having taught a class. (See
his letter to Murray Ross in Part 2.) After fearing for over a year that he
might have to move to the United States to find a teaching job, he was
finally offered a promising position in the new department of religion
at McMaster University in Hamilton. The next twenty years there were
rewarding ones. By the mid-1960s his thought had become more coher-
ent and more confident. He had explicitly rejected Hegel's philosophy
and was avidly reading the German-American political philosopher Leo
Strauss, and he was also planning to write a book on the French mystic
and philosopher Simone Weil. Philip Sherrard's The Greek East and the
Latin West helped to clarify his misgivings about Western Christianity.
Living in southern Ontario was itself an educational experience. The
booming technological world was all around him and he worked at a
university that had its own nuclear reactor. In 1966 he read Jacques
Ellul's The Technological Society, and he felt as if a new planet had swum
into his ken. It further clarified the meaning of the political events with
which he had dealt in his best-selling book Lament for a Nation. In 1969,
with the help of poet and editor Dennis Lee, he put together a collection
of essays on mainly political themes, Technology and Empire.
It might appear that in this great flurry of activity in the mid-1960s
Grant had changed some of his views dramatically. The admiration for
Hegel seen in Philosophy in the Mass Age and renounced in 1966 would
seem to be an example of this. But in fact the change had been grad-
ual and his view of Hegel had been ambivalent, as is clear from a 1956
notebook. Grant did not have a cut-and-dried system and did not seek
to create one. 'One thing about life: how is one to suppose that one's
position at the moment is final, when one already knows so much from
life and has learnt it on the way? Presumably one is going to learn
more.'0 Grant had indeed learnt more since the 1950s, but his pro-
found adherence to Christianity and to Plato never wavered. His
understanding of both was enriched by his continuing study of Simone
Weil, who could herself be described as a Platonist within Christianity.
Grant's next book, Time as History (1970), was a study of Nietzsche's
thought and its influence on modernity. It was originally delivered as
the 1969 Massey lectures on CBC. In the middle of revising it for publi-
cation, Grant and his wife were nearly killed in an automobile acci-
dent. His injuries required a long convalescence and he never quite
regained his old zest for life.
 Introduction 7

The question that haunted him during the early 1970s was how one
could think about the Good (or God) when technology had destroyed
the very language by which such thought could be expressed. He
started to use the word 'justice' rather than 'good,' since he thought
that justice was a word that still had resonance. He struggled with this
dilemma in two unfinished manuscripts, 'Good and Technique' and
Technique and the Good.' They contained some of the ideas that
appeared much later in Technology and Justice (1986). In 1977 he com-
pleted the revision of the Wood lectures he had delivered at Mount
Allison University in 1974. English-Speaking Justice was a devastating cri-
tique of modern liberalism and its deterioration under the corrosive
influence of the very technology it had made possible.
Towards the end of the 1970s Grant became increasingly frustrated
by the direction the department of religion at McMaster was taking. It
had once centred on the great religious traditions of East and West. Its
teachers explored these from within the traditions themselves and
raised with students the universal questions inherent in them. Now,
Grant thought, the department had come to concentrate on historical
scholarship at the expense of raising philosophical questions (see 'The
Battle between Teaching and Research' in Part 2). In 1980 Grant left
McMaster and returned to Dalhousie, where he taught classes in politi-
cal science and classics until his retirement in 1984. He still had close
friends at Dalhousie, though he found the university itself changed for
the worse.
Many honours came to him during this period: the Chauvais Medal
from the Royal Society, several honorary degrees, and an appointment
to the Order of Canada. These honours were curious, since most influ-
ential Canadians did not share his views, particularly his critique of
technology, and his Christianity was not fashionable in the secular
atmosphere of the modern university. As his former student and col-
league Louis Greenspan expressed it: 'As one who loved his country,
he welcomed this recognition, but not without the dismay that Tertul-
lian or Justin Martyr or any other early Christian might have felt had
their indictments of the Roman gods as demons been greeted with
thunderous ovations from the Roman Senate.'6
During the early 1980s Grant's main philosophical experience was
reflecting on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequal-
ity among Men. Grant had come to believe that Rousseau's importance
as a maker of modernity had not been fully understood. To explore
this theme, he started writing a work on history and justice. His other
8 Introduction

great experience was a literary one: he read and re-read the three last
novels of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, about which he made voluminous
notes towards a possible book. His last book, Technology and Justice
(1986), was a collection of essays which he revised for publication.
Poor health and frequent visits to the hospital took up a great deal
of his time and energy after he retired. However, he became more and
more interested in the writings of the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger and began work on what he hoped would be his magnum
opus, a defence of Christianity and Platonism against Heidegger's
attack. In August 1988 he began the preliminary chapter, but on 6 Sep-
tember he learned he had pancreatic cancer. He died on 27 Septem-
ber 1988.

Politics and Morality

Why is the first section of this reader titled 'Politics and Morality?'
George Grant was usually described as a political philosopher, and he
accepted that description. Why then 'morality?' In his last book, Tech-
nology and Justice, he portrayed himself as one who in political philoso-
phy was above all 'a lover of Plato within Christianity.' This position is
implicit in his writings from beginning to end. He would not, and per-
haps could not, separate political philosophy from the central ques-
tion of how it is good for human beings to live together. His thought
about political subjects was necessarily part of his thought about the
whole. If political thought is concerned with judgments about good-
ness, it must depend on what one believes human beings to be.
For the ancients (particularly Plato and Aristotle), wisdom and the
virtue that led to it and flowed from it was the highest achievement of
human beings and constituted their excellence. In the modern world,
especially since Machiavelli, freedom and equality have replaced wis-
dom and virtue as the highest goods for men and women. Grant had
no doubt that the conceptions held by the ancients were more pro-
found than those of the moderns. He always questioned the position
that freedom defined the essence of human beings. Are we free to
make our own values? If so, whose values are to determine how we
should be governed? Is there an eternal order which defines and limits
us, as Plato believed, or is it our destiny to make ourselves and our
world? Is there any truth that it is incumbent upon us to know, or is
truth simply a means of dominating the world as an extension of our
limitless freedom?
 Introduction 9

Although the samples of Grant's writings on politics and morality

presented in this section might seem a curious mixture, they represent
the way he engaged not only his fellow academics but the general pub-
lic as well. Here are the speeches describing the kind of society devel-
oping in Canada; the value of the British Empire; words of
encouragement and warning to the young students of the New Left
who were protesting against the Vietnam War; articles about prime
ministers and political writers; a chapter written to help define the
direction the New Democratic Party might take; a polemic against abor-
tion on demand; and praise for Canadian authors who wrote against
the free-trade agreement with the United States. The two most impor-
tant excerpts are those from Grant's Lament for a Nation and English-
Speaking Justice.
Grant had doubted that he would find a publisher for his lament,
since it so directly challenged the orthodoxy of the continentalist
Canadian elite. However, McClelland and Stewart quickly agreed to
publish it and it became an immediate best-seller. The central subject
was an account of Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's
actions, particularly in 1962-3 when he revealed the tragic flaws in his
own conservatism and, more seriously, in the conservatism that stood
as Canada's foundation. Diefenbaker's government was defeated in
1963 on the issue of whether Canada should accept or reject nuclear
weapons for its armed forces. Diefenbaker saw the American pressure
to accept these weapons as an intolerable affront to Canadian inde-
pendence, though Liberal leader Lester Pearson regarded it as an
aspect of a friendly and dutiful relationship with an important ally.
(Trudeau's metaphor of the mouse going to bed with the elephant
comes to mind.) What Grant was lamenting was not the downfall of an
imperfect, though brave, politician, but the fact that it had become
impossible for Canada to retain any real independence as a nation.
The surprising effect of this bleak conclusion was that it stirred a gen-
eration of young Canadians to an unprecedented outpouring of Cana-
dian nationalism.
Lament for a Nation was not only an account of a few years of Cana-
dian politics and a description of the decay of conservatism. It was a
deep philosophical analysis, but what really moved its readers was its
character as a prose poem about the love of one's own, about the
hopes that had inspired the founders of Canada, about loyalty that is
unseduced and unterrified, about the deeper issues of necessity and
goodness, the limits of freedom, and the terrible practical conse-
10 Introduction

quences of believing that providence could be understood in terms of

historical progress. As Jim Laxer, then a prominent student leader,
recollected: 'Lament for a Nation is the most important book I ever read
in my life. Here was a crazy old philosopher of religion at McMaster
and he woke up half our generation. He was saying Canada was dead,
and, by saying it, he was creating the country.'7 Even thirty years after
the publication of Lament, it does not ring false. Conservative insider
Hugh Segal, when asked to name a single book that could convey to a
foreigner the character of Canada, unhesitatingly chose Lament for a
Nation: ' [It] had an indelible effect on me, encapsulating the differ-
ence between the Tory vision for Canada and the continentalist, mech-
anistic, commercialist view.'8
In English-Speaking Justice Grant analysed the nature of modern con-
tractarian liberalism. He made clear that he was not attacking the orig-
inal principles on which our political and legal institutions were
founded, based on the conception of a justice that required liberty and
equality. It would be insane, he declared, to deny that political liberty
is a central human good. But contemporary contractual liberalism had
darkened the very conception of justice. To illustrate that insight,
Grant analysed the American Supreme Court decision on abortion,
Roe v. Wade.
The survival of our traditional liberty, Grant thought, is also threat-
ened by the concentration of our technology on mastery, including
now the mastery of human beings. 'The practical question is whether a
society in which technology must be oriented to cybernetics can main-
tain the institutions of free politics and the protection by law of the
rights of the individual.' English-Speaking Justice is probably Grant's
most powerfully sustained writing in political philosophy.

Philosophy and Education

In this section, we meet a Grant who is as passionately concerned

about the centrality of philosophy to education as he is about the sig-
nificance of morality for politics. In the world of politics, the good for
men and women is either supported or neglected through action. In
the context of learning, knowledge must be related to its proper place
in the whole. Without adequate foundations, both action and knowl-
edge become shallow or perverse. In both cases, our well-being as
something more than comfortable animals is involved.
Grant's first occasion to reflect seriously about philosophy came to
 Introduction 11

him soon after he had received his DPhil from Oxford in 1950. He was
invited to contribute a research essay on the state of philosophy in
English-speaking Canada to the Massey royal commission on arts and
letters (See his article 'Philosophy') At this time Grant was inexperi-
enced in academic politics. His essay offended many influential Cana-
dian philosophers, not least because he wrote about the teaching of
philosophy in Canada with supreme confidence in the justice of his
disapproval of the prevailing approaches. We can see in it a brilliant
statement of a conviction that the next forty years would in no way
invalidate. Nor was this emphasis on the fundamental role of philoso-
phy reserved only for his professional colleagues. In 'What Is Philoso-
phy,' a radio talk which serves as a prologue to this book, the style is
much less academic and, although the talk ends rather as the earlier
report had begun, the approach is gender. In the former essay, the
word God is thrown down like a challenge in the first sentence. Here it
comes as a climax, defining an experience open to us all if we choose
to meditate on the mystery and meaning of human life.
Through the 1950s Grant spoke frequently about the unrecognized
dignity of the teacher's vocation. 'I learned early that there is no more
honourable or skilled profession, nor any more open to temptation in
a society such as ours.' He never refused when schoolteachers invited
him to speak, mainly because of his almost unlimited hope as to what
might be achieved through genuine education. In 'The Paradox of
Democratic Education,' written in 1955, he was able to say about the
activity of thinking: 'It will teach you what is real, it will give you the
vision of God.' He used the words 'real' and 'God' as if they were syn-
onymous. And to him they were. What could either word mean if sepa-
rated? It was to be many years before Grant learned to be more
cautious about the word 'God' and to find alternatives that had more
resonance for his audience. It was already quite acceptable to hear
God called 'the supreme value'; that could mean anything or nothing
at all. But to identify God with reality is quite another matter.
When Grant moved to Ontario in 1960 he realized gradually that he
had much to learn about society's view of education. He had not been
able fully to experience the technological world in the Maritimes; he
hoped to be able to do so in Ontario. His own early hope for progress
had been hard to give up, and his sense that Hegel might be right had
reinforced the confidence with which he had faced the teaching pro-
fession in those years. It is interesting to note that, when in 1969 he
republished an article on religion in the state school system that had
12 Introduction

originally appeared six years earlier in the Queen's Quarterly, he added

a scathing introduction about how stupid the initial piece had been.
'The folly of this writing is that it did not grasp what the technological
society really is ... I had hoped for years that our ecclesiastical organi-
zations (being guardians of the beauty of the gospel) might continue
to be able to permeate this society with something nobler than the
barrenness of technical dynamism ... I could not believe that the only
interpretation of Christianity that the technological liberalism would
allow to survive publicly would be that part of it (eg the thought of
Teilhard) which played the role of flatterer to modernity.'9 This was
not a change in Grant's view of education, but a recognition that he
had overestimated the possible influence of the churches.
While teaching in Ontario during the 1960s, Grant wrote 'The Uni-
versity Curriculum,' a complex analysis of how the aims of the techno-
logical society were reflected in Ontario universities and how much
modern ideology determined what subjects were to be central in the
curriculum. At first glance the subjects appeared to be an eclectic
mixture, lacking an overall unity. Grant believed this to be false.
Under continental capitalism, the dominant classes had the money
and therefore the power to dictate to the universities, and they knew
exactly what they wanted. Whatever subjects would help to push the
world in their preferred direction were the ones that they supported.
Subjects would be taught as techniques, unrelated to any conception
of the whole other than that of serving technological progress.
Advances in technology would themselves be identified with advances
in human excellence. The openness of mind required by philosophy
towards modern assumptions would be a waste of time and money.
When considering the curriculum of Ontario universities, Grant was
struck by the unspoken application of the fact/value distinction. Since
Max Weber invented this expression for use in social science, it has
trickled down from the academic to the popular level and has gradu-
ally been accepted as part of modern wisdom. Most of us now take for
granted that 'facts' and 'values' are completely separate. 'Facts' are
objective, and they give us knowledge, but only knowledge that is
quantifiable by the scientific method. Questions of good and bad are
not factual, and can be relegated to our value systems, which are pri-
vate preferences, without rational content, and have no basis in the
nature of things; so judgments as to good and bad can be attributed
mainly to our emotional make-up. The distinction has been very use-
ful in achieving mastery over human as well as non-human nature. It
 Introduction 13

determines what those in power decide is important to teach at univer-

sities: the studies that deal with facts - like engineering, commerce,
chemistry, and medicine. This kind of research, which is praised
because it is value free, leads to unchecked technological progress.
The high prestige of these areas of study spill over into the humanities
and social sciences, which are in their turn expected also to be value
free.
In his early essay for the Massey royal commission, Grant had
defined philosophy as having some relation to our intuitions of the
perfection of God. However, Grant was not a proselytizer. It should be
understood that neither then nor later did he try to turn his students
into Christians, although they might be aware of his own faith. Nor did
he expect all of them to spend their lives in the systematic study of phi-
losophy. What he hoped to foster in them were minds open to the
whole and the ability to give their attention to careful thought. Given
these qualities, the important questions are likely to arise. They will be
questions such as: What is my eternal destiny? What for? - whither? -
and what then? What is the nature of love, of beauty, of goodness?
'These questions are real questions, tough and intractable intellectual
questions and, above all, they are questions for which education is
required if a clear and cogent answer is to be given. Therefore they
cannot be excluded from the university.'10 Grant's students would
sometimes complain that when they asked him a question his answer
would be another question. They came gradually to understand the
reason behind his teaching style. It was implicit in his frequently
quoted passage from Luther: 'A man must do his own believing as he
does his own dying.'
After twenty years at McMaster, Grant decided to return to Dalhou-
sie for his last four years before retirement. He had become dissatisfied
with the department of religion because of its concentration on
research to the exclusion of other methods of intellectual enquiry. As
he explained in 'The Battle between Teaching and Research,' the
most important questions cannot be answered by research conducted
along the lines of the scientific method. They require the method of
dialectic - sustained and disciplined conversation between teacher and
student, or student and student. If one writes an essay for a teacher,
one is engaged in a kind of conversation. This short article summarizes
not only the kind of teaching that opens others to philosophic think-
ing, but also reflects Grant's increasing despair over the direction of
Canadian universities since the 1960s.
14 Introduction

Thinking Their Thoughts

Readers of Grant's work will not find systematic and comprehensive

expositions of the philosophers named in this section. They were sim-
ply the thinkers from whom he learnt most about what primarily con-
cerned him as being philosophy's most urgent need; such questions as
the nature of modernity here and now, its potentiality for good or ill,
and its relation to and difference from the traditions of the ancients.
He did not aspire to be 'creative' but rather to attempt to be 'open to
the whole,' which he thought should be the aim of philosophy. He
hoped to go a little way towards understanding and clarifying some
ultimate questions about human existence. From the genius of certain
other thinkers he found insights that greatly illuminated his own intui-
tions as to what was happening in modernity, and why the obscurity
that surrounded us was so dark.
Grant thought that the Gospels stood at the centre of any attempt to
understand the world and the human predicament. He believed that
Christianity was truth, and that true philosophy would never contradict
the Gospels. But he needed philosophy to help him understand them.
He did not seek one philosophic mentor, or even one area of expertise
to make his own and in which to produce systematic expositions, valu-
able as these might be. Especially in the modern world, when the tradi-
tion had been so shattered, he could never have become the follower
of an exclusive school. He liked to quote Jonathan Swift's description
of modern thinkers as spiders, spinning their thoughts out of them-
selves. Grant thought himself more like one of the ancients, whom
Swift pictured as bees, taking their nourishment from several flowers.
The philosophers included here are those Grant thought could
teach us the most about modernity, its great accomplishments, its puz-
zling character, and its tragic limitations. He studied Plato, St August-
ine, and Kant while at Oxford in the 1940s, and he continued to find
new insights in their writings for the rest of his life. During the 1950s
he was also much preoccupied with Marx, whom he understood as a
great moral, even religious, thinker. Although he first encountered
Simone Weil's writings in 1951, he was initially so disturbed by her
moral and ascetic intensity that it was not until near the end of the
1950s that he understood her greatness as a philosopher. In the late
1950s he had discovered the writings of the German-American political
philosopher Leo Strauss, and through him the French thinker Alexan-
dre Kojeve. He studied Martin Heidegger's 1927 existentialist classic
 Introduction 15

Sein und Zeit'm the 1950s and taught Heidegger's writings in the 1960s;
but it was not until the 1970s that he realized how brightly Heidegger's
understanding of technology illuminated the modern condition. His
understanding of Heidegger had been aided by his acceptance of the
genius of Heidegger's master, Nietzsche, whose greatness as a philoso-
pher of the modern fell on Grant like a revelation. Only in the 1980s
did he seriously come to terms with the early writings of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who clarified for him the historical character of being
human in the contemporary world.
Grant was not without personal ambition (though he considered self-
assertion a vice he had to fight); yet what he really sought was always in
some sense outside himself, and outside even the greatest of his teach-
ers. It was a wonderful joy to learn what Plato believed about the Beau-
tiful Itself; but, as he said to his students, the final reason for studying
Plato is the question of whether or not the Beautiful Itself exists. Reflec-
tion on the thought of Kant was a fascinating intellectual experience,
but what mattered most was that Kant, for all his contradictions, clari-
fied certain aspects of reality in a way no other thinker did.
Since Grant never published traditional scholarly expositions of
Augustine, Plato, or Kant (though he lectured about them in great
detail), it is difficult in this volume to make their importance to his
thought sufficiently explicit. Many highly original lectures exist, but
most are not in publishable form.
Grant's interest in St Augustine is shown here in a radio talk about a
distinguished classics professor, Charles Cochrane. In 1941 Cochrane
published a book, Christianity and Classical Culture, which showed how
Augustine had unified Christianity with the truths of classical philoso-
phy and in so doing had founded the Western Christian church and
the civilization that flowed from it. Grant's reading of Cochrane taught
him how to approach the complex relationship between philosophy
and revealed religion. St Augustine's City of God and De Trinitate were
fruitful texts in teaching, because they raised the most fundamental
and perennial questions, such as the relation of time and history, of
necessity and the good, and freedom and will. Grant found that the
students responded passionately, for example, to Augustine's paradox
that to be able not to sin is a great freedom, but not to be able to sin is
the greatest freedom.
Although he later became convinced, partly by his study of Philip
Sherrard's The Greek East and the Latin West, that Augustine had been
the source of a fatal misunderstanding that has permeated Western
16 Introduction

Christianity, Grant never doubted Augustine's central position in the

development of the church, whether for good or for ill.
Grant first read and loved Plato's Republic while he was studying at
Oxford after the war, but it was not until his years at Dalhousie in the
1950s that Plato became his greatest philosophic eros. He credited his
friend and colleague James Doull with showing him the central truths
of Plato's teaching, and it became Plato even more than St Augustine
who helped him to see how his Christian faith could be thought. As
he explained in a letter: 'Sureness is not necessarily dogmatism ... I
know God exists. Plato shows to those who listen that one cannot
avoid that conclusion ... Life has been too long for me and I had to
learn at too great a price not to be frank about what one believes. At
the personal and practical level I am always unsure and confused but
at this level I know I am right, not because of the "I" but because the
arguments are irrefutable. And nothing could be more important
than this because in the next years the future of the world is tied up
with those who have rational love of God ... one cannot speak wrongly
when one has Plato and Augustine and Kant behind one. The issue is
not really God but whether philosophy is a practical study which can
help me to live.'11
Plato's thought was present in all Grant's work from the 1950s,
sometimes explicit, though more often implicit. We find it most clearly
in his essay 'Justice and Technology,' and also in 'Faith and the Multi-
versity.' It is implied in all his writings on politics and education. In the
darkness of 'A Platitude' Plato shines in the last sentence like a great
light. His understanding of Plato continued to evolve and deepen. The
direction of his thought on Plato was first influenced by the pagan
writer Plotinus, but he later found a sure and certain guide in the
more clearly Christian perspective of Simone Weil.
Grant first read Kant while at Oxford and often attended lectures
given in London by his close friend Peter Self. Grant was immediately
attracted by Kant: ' [I] was intoxicated by Kant's account of morality. It
freed me from all the vulgar liberal pragmatism'12 While he was teach-
ing at Dalhousie, Grant would regularly have senior students over to
his house for evening seminars. When these did not deal with St
Augustine, they would be about Kant, usually the Critique of Pure Rea-
son. This text certainly required students to develop the faculty of
attention. The Critique of Practical Reason he left for his ordinary classes.
He continued to teach Kant from time to time for the rest of his aca-
demic life and became increasingly fascinated by the complex position
 Introduction 17

Kant holds in the history of philosophy: an innovator of modernity,

while at the same time the great delayer of its worst excesses. In later
years, Grant mainly taught the Critique of Practical Reason, because, as
Kant said, it is in the practical life, rather than in the theoretical, that
we face the ultimate.
Grant's thought was powerfully attracted by the way society was
developing and the moral problems that individuals would face as a
consequence of these developments. He therefore turned to see what
the great political philosophers could teach him about impending
problems. The first of these thinkers was Karl Marx, who was much in
Grant's mind during the 1950s. A humanism of universal salvation with
no theological framework would have held little attraction for him in
itself. Yet he admired the passion with which Marx hated the oppres-
sion of human beings, and the fervour with which he tried to under-
stand the means of its overcoming. Such admiration was quite lacking
in his attitude to Marx's great teacher, Hegel. While Hegel's massive
system claimed a total comprehensiveness, Grant found nothing there
of what he admired in Marx: a sense of the importance of individual
men and women, and the pain they suffered. Although Grant contin-
ued to take great interest in Marx as a founder of the modern, in the
1980s, as was noted earlier, he turned increasingly to Rousseau and
began to sketch out his thoughts on the role Rousseau, Marx, and Dar-
win had played in forming the modern idea of history.
If someone had asked him which thinker had the deepest under-
standing of the goodness of being, he might have hesitated between
Plato and Simone Weil. Weil was a French philosopher, born nine
years before Grant, who died tragically early. She wrote with genius
about Christ and Plato and showed how they illuminated one another.
Like Augustine, Weil believed that Plato knew all the truth of Chris-
tianity, except that the Word had been made flesh. Grant firmly
believed that Weil was a saint as well as a philosopher of genius; her
sanctity gave an added authority to the power of her thought. Never-
theless, he had two reservations about her. First, he believed that a
public religion was necessary for the state, and he did not see how
Weil's austere faith could provide this. Secondly, although she said
clearly that one must never seek affliction for oneself, some of her writ-
ings seemed to imply the contrary, as did some of her actions. Other
reservations were of a more personal nature concerning what Grant
saw as his own limitations and failings. He was very much aware that he
could not even desire a life like hers, with so much suffering. (This is
18 Introduction

not an uncommon reaction among readers of Weil.) Yet he was con-

vinced that at the centre of her thought she was nearer the truth about
the Divine than anyone else he had ever encountered.
Grant chanced upon Weil's writing when the CBC sent him her post-
humous book, Waiting on God, to review over the radio. By the 1960s he
hoped to write a biographical introduction to her thought. For this
purpose he went to Paris in 1963 to consult her manuscripts and to
meet her mother, her brother, and her friend and later biographer,
Simone Petrement. Although this book was never written, he contin-
ued to read and learn and teach about her, but, as he said, he wanted
others to read what she herself had written rather than to learn about
her thoughts second-hand through him.
In the later 1950s the University of Toronto philosopher Emile Fack-
enheim had suggested that Grant read the work of one of Heidegger's
students, Leo Strauss. Starting with What Is Political Philosophy? Grant
greedily devoured everything he could find of Strauss's. In these writ-
ings, he discovered a defence of Plato and Aristotle in terms of virtue
and morality, and an analysis of the modern philosophers from Machi-
avelli to Nietzsche that showed the steady decline of the classical vision
of human excellence. Grant was deeply moved by Strauss's Thoughts on
Machiavelli, with its forthright condemnation of that thinker as a
'teacher of evil.' (Few political scientists still thought in terms of evil,
since they were mostly converts to Max Weber's concept of a value-free
social science.)
Grant learned much from Strauss and gratefully acknowledged his
influence. However, throughout the 1960s, Grant came to understand
that they differed on many important matters, primarily Strauss's
understanding of Plato's dialogues. Strauss, Grant concluded, denied
the presence in Plato of the transcendent, which Grant saw as insepa-
rable from the heart of Plato's greatest writings. He also complained
that Strauss seemed strangely reticent about his own belief concerning
the relation between reason and revelation. Although most of Strauss's
followers did not consider him in any way a religious thinker, Grant
disagreed. He often mentioned the beautiful but ambiguous passage
from the end of the essay 'What is Political Philosophy?': 'Modern
thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the
most radical historicism, ie, in explicitly condemning to oblivion the
notion of eternity. For oblivion of eternity, or in other words, estrange-
ment from man's deepest desire and therewith from the primary
issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the very begin-
 Introduction 19

ning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become master and

owner of nature, to conquer chance.'13
In the late 1960s Grant and Strauss had an affable correspondence
but they had never met personally. When a mutual friend heard that
Strauss was seriously ill, he arranged a meeting between Grant and
Strauss, and Grant's admiration and affection for the man himself was
confirmed. But by the late 1970s, Grant realized more and more that
Strauss's interpretation of Plato was an indirect attack on Christianity.
Strauss and Grant agreed on the importance of Platonism for Chris-
tianity, but Strauss thought that each had been harmed by the encoun-
ter. Strauss tried to counteract what he considered to be distortion in
Christianized Platonism and sought a hermeneutic to recover Plato's
authentic meaning. Strauss believed that Christianity led to an over-
extension of soul, and Grant always considered this criticism worthy of
close attention. He continued to return to Strauss with enjoyment,
especially when he felt intellectually and spiritually drained by his
immersion in Simone Weil's thought. 'Simone Weil has a much
greater authority for me than Strauss. Strauss has just enabled me to
see what is involved in modern political philosophy and the means of
rejecting it. S.W. seems to me at the highest level of illumination. Yet it
leads to a life I am just not capable of living.'14
Grant was never one of the Straussians, but he was liked by them and
admitted to their friendship. He received the unpublished notes from
Strauss's graduate seminars and had a riotous relationship with Allan
Bloom, then at the University of Toronto. Grant loved his outrageous-
ness, though he disagreed with many of Bloom's opinions. Grant was
invited quite often to gatherings at the Toronto flat of his Straussian
friend, Howard Brotz, and was even allowed to bring his wife.
In the essay 'Tyranny and Wisdom' we can see Grant's entire agree-
ment with Strauss about the nature of the universal and homogeneous
state whose coming-to-be the Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve confidently
predicted. Grant thought that this could only be a terrible tyranny. The
essay has great relevance for us today, now that such a state is often held
up as an ideal, for example in Frances Fukuyama's The End of History
and the Last Man (1992). We should also note that Grant learned much
from Kojeve, not least a darker view of Hegel that was evidenced in his
praise of the universal and homogeneous state. Grant had not seen that
ruthless side of Hegel in his conversations with his friend James Doull,
still less in his reading of the English Hegelian writers. In this regard,
Kojeve, too, can be accounted a major influence on Grant.
20 Introduction

Martin Heidegger's thought is notoriously obscure. Grant would

normally introduce him to students by means of the essay 'The Ques-
tion Concerning Technology,' or sometimes by the more accessible
'Memorial Address' in the book Discourse on Thinking. However, it is an
oversimplification to suggest that he accepted Heidegger's analysis of
technology and rejected the rest of the teaching. Grant was extremely
anxious to understand modernity and he had no doubt that Heideg-
ger was incomparably the greatest philosopher of the modern.
Already, in the 1950s, before much of Heidegger was available in
English, Grant recognized in the politically discredited philosopher a
new and exciting voice. He would constantly quote Heidegger's dic-
tum 'Let it lie before you, and take it to heart - the Being of beings.'
He took seriously Heidegger's criticism of Plato's use of the concept of
'truth.' (Grant's refutation of this view can be found in the essay 'Jus-
tice and Technology'.)
Grant lectured on Heidegger in the 1970s, always with a deep
respect and a certain agnosticism. He knew that there were some
things in Heidegger's thought he did not yet understand, and he knew
that he needed to do so. He did not want to go back to Plato like visit-
ing a museum, ignoring all that had happened in philosophy since
antiquity. Rather Grant strove to think Plato's certainties in the world
as it has now become - the world of technology, modern science, and
radical freedom. That was Grant's approach to all the thinkers with
whose thought he wrestled and it is why we call this section 'Thinking
Their Thoughts.'
For many years Grant hoped to write a book confronting Heideg-
ger's dismissal of Plato's thought. Leo Strauss, when they met, advised
him to approach what he wanted to do through Heidegger's writings
on Nietzsche. After Grant retired in 1984, he concentrated on this task,
reading and re-reading the four volumes of Heidegger's writings on
Nietzsche, beautifully edited by David Krell. Grant found reading these
an overwhelming experience - Heidegger at his best. The possible
points of attack gradually became clearer. In attempting to defend
Plato against Heidegger's profound criticisms, Grant knew that he
would also (and more importantly) be defending Christianity against
Heidegger's contempt. As already noted, Grant could only write a pre-
liminary chapter (itself incomplete) before the onset of his final ill-
ness. He had intended it for inclusion in a volume honouring his
friend James Doull.
One reason why Grant found Heidegger's Nietzsche so fascinating
 Introduction 21

was that he had himself in his youth come to the conclusion that
Nietzsche was unjustly underrated or ignored by English-speaking phi-
losophers. He devoted his Massey lectures of 1969, Time as History, to
an exposition of Nietzsche's role as the great philosopher of a new
vision of existence. Here he clearly expresses a principle that regulated
all his teaching and writing: it is not useful to reject a philosopher until
one has first attempted to think his thought as clearly and consistently
as possible. Even when expounding a thinker whom one considers a
teacher of evil, it is both wrong and ineffective to try to innoculate stu-
dents by presenting them at the outset with one's own negative conclu-
sions. To do so is to deny that the students are free and rational, and
also to deny the dialectic method, which lay at the heart of Grant's
pedagogy.
Nietzsche so embodies the modern conception of the world that it is
necessary, contrary to Strauss's view, to teach him in careful detail. At
the end of 'Time as History' Grant explains this necessity. Many people
who have never heard of Nietzsche may yet be thinking his thoughts.
'If one listens carefully to the revolt of the noblest young against bour-
geois America, one hears deeper notes in it than were ever sounded by
Marx, and those are above all the notes of Nietzsche.''0 It is important
that these notes be known for what they are. The love of one's fate for
which he calls is not a passive acceptance but a dynamic willing.
According to Nietzsche, the ability to will for the sake of willing is the
very height for human beings. If we can overcome our ressentiment and
our desire for revenge, and claim the earth as our true home, we may
be able to love our fate and to know that we live beyond good and evil.
In Time as History Grant defends his decision to teach Nietzsche to
the young. And in 'Nietzsche and the Ancients' he defends his own
final rejection of Nietzsche. There, he goes so far as to say that this
denial expresses his rejection of the whole modern project. Could it be
that such a rejection on his part necessarily involves a failure to be open
to the whole, a disposition that Grant held to be essential to a philoso-
pher? He answers this question by asserting what he calls in Philosophy
and the Mass Age 'the test of the limitless.' Nietzsche's failure is that he
recognizes no limits beyond which we may not go. No other modern or
ancient philosopher explicitly taught that there are human beings to
whom nothing at all is due. In his constant denial of equality, Nietzsche
does just that. Grant reminds us that Nietzsche's terrifying definition of
what he calls 'justice' should be a warning to us as to what might be
done to some other human beings if we go beyond good and evil.
22 Introduction

Grant's discovery in his final years at Dalhousie was Jean-Jacques

Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, a work he came to see as
a revolutionary statement that human beings are fundamentally histor-
ical beings, rather than creatures of a transcendent Divinity: 'It is only
this year that I discovered that Rousseau was a greater former of the
modern than even Nietzsche. The result is that at the moment I am
writing a long piece called "History and Justice" which is an attempt to
understand the atheism of the left better than previously. Rousseau
takes my breath away with how clever he is in destroying the old tradi-
tion by saying that reason is acquired by human beings in a way that
can be explained without teleology. To try to demolish Rousseau (and,
therefore, marxism) seems to me essential these days to free people
from that which can hold them from ever thinking that Christianity
might be true.' 16

Reviews and Essays

The first item in this section, a short review of a study of Francis Bacon,
is interesting for two reasons. Grant wrote it soon after taking his first
teaching appointment at Dalhousie in 1947. It shows how early in his
career he became interested in the questions that would later come to
dominate his thought: the rise of modern science and its impact on
society. However, the review is interesting for another, more personal,
reason. Fulton Anderson, the author of the book, was head of the phi-
losophy department at the University of Toronto and one of the most
powerful academic philosophers in Canada. Anderson was furious
when he read the criticism by a novice philosopher in faraway Halifax
and telephoned Dalhousie's president to demand an apology. Later,
when Grant wrote his article on philosophy for the Massey commis-
sion, he added to the offence he had given in his review, and from that
time on Anderson was implacably hostile.
Grant learned from this experience and began to write more cau-
tiously, or indirectly as he called it. His article on Bertrand Russell
was, as he explained to his mother in a letter, a firm but oblique reply
to Anderson's criticisms of him: 'The real substance of my disagree-
ment with Anderson and Co. is that philosophy is not really a theoreti-
cal subject to be held in the confines of a university but a way of life
that all men must strive for.'17 'Anderson's words were written too
much in anger to answer them. I will answer them in the long years of
writing philosophy. Controversy generally gets beclouded and I have a
 Introduction 23

feeling that it would be a waste of time to argue with Anderson.'18 His

essay on Bertrand Russell was meant to serve as a reply to Anderson's
position, since he considered that both philosophers shared a com-
mon confusion.
Readers will no doubt be struck by the hostile tone of most of the
essays and reviews in this section. The reason for his critical stance is
that Grant was already convinced, as Philosophy in the Mass Age shows,
that the problems with modern society were deep and fundamental.
In order to understand how this society had come about, Grant
explored the writings of some of its exemplars and founders, such as
Russell, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and C.G. Jung. His criticisms of
these writers were trenchantly expressed because he felt so deeply
about the kind of world they had created. He later addressed the
inadequacies of some of his fellow Canadian thinkers, such as Harold
Innis and Northrop Frye, whom he had earlier praised in his 'Philoso-
phy' article. Although he thought that Innis was admirable, at least as
a social scientist, Innis's critique of contemporary society was not radi-
cal enough for he failed to advance beyond the question of how
modernity had developed.
Some of Grant's readers become frustrated with his writings. He is a
brilliant critic, they complain. He articulates in telling detail what is
wrong, but he never says what we should do about it. They will perhaps
be surprised to learn that Grant felt the same way about some of his
own writings. As he wrote in the mid-1970s to Dennis Lee, with whom
he was discussing a proposed new collection of essays: 'On re-reading
them they seem to be negative and austere. I intend to write an intro-
duction in which the purpose of the negations is made plain - namely
that they exist to clear away the junk of the modern era and to say how
difficult it is to make positive affirmations. I hope the introduction will
make clear that these essays are really attempts in the old manner of
negative theology.'19
As a respite, he turned to music and literature. Mozart was his great-
est love and a day rarely passed when he did not listen to one of the
master's piano concertos. In the late 1970s he had discovered the war-
time trilogy of the controversial French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
Although Celine had written vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets before the
war, Grant was enraptured by his final writing, an account of his flight
through war-ravaged Europe with his wife, Lili, arid his cat, Bebert,
during the collapse of the Nazi regime. He found in Celine the prodi-
gality of imagination that he had previously encountered only in
24 Introduction

Shakespeare and Tolstoy. He wrote of this in an article for the Queen's

Quarterly, 'Celine - Art and Politics.' 'I have put aside 'Technology and
Justice" till I have written the Celine, largely because I was sick of nega-
tivity and criticism and was so enraptured by Celine.'20 Dennis Lee had
helped Grant enormously by his brilliant editing of Technology and
Empire and by his constant prodding and encouragement. In a collec-
tion celebrating Dennis Lee at mid-career, Grant contributed an essay,
'Dennis Lee - Poetry and Philosophy.' Grant did not easily enjoy mod-
ern poetry, but his friendship with Lee made him more open to his
work. Indeed, Lee was perhaps the only living poet with whose work
Grant felt at ease.

Technology and Modernity

This section could almost be called 'Modernity as Technology.' In the

1950s Grant tried to come to terms with what was happening in North
American society in a number of different ways. He analysed it as the
expanding economy, the atomic age, the mass society. None was satis-
factory because each sought to understand modernity as something
'out there.' Grant intuitively sensed that modernity was something
more fundamental, that it was not merely a set of things that could be
controlled. Technology was slowly and insidiously shaping not just
external nature but human beings as well.
After the mid-1960s and for the rest of his life, Grant was deeply
engrossed in the effort to understand technology: what it did to our
world, what it portended for the future, and how it almost totally lim-
ited our ability to see anything outside itself. At the end of the 1950s he
had even considered moving with his family to California so that
he could experience the full force of the dynamic society that was
developing in North America. The writings of Alexandre Kojeve had
pointed out that the world was moving remorselessly towards a univer-
sal and homogeneous state and Leo Strauss had convinced him that
this coming civilization would be a terrible tyranny. Grant had put
these thoughts to brilliant use in Lament for a Nation and in the address
he delivered in 1964 to the Canadian Conference on Social Welfare,
'Value and Technology.' This talk is particularly interesting because it
vividly portrays the effects of technology without much using the con-
cept itself. The loss of meaning in society, Grant suggested, was a con-
dition that challenged social workers to the limit of their capacity, or
even beyond. As a teacher, Grant had encountered similar difficulties
 Introduction 25

and so identified with the social workers. In his essay 'In Defence of
North America' Grant pointed out that our continent is the dynamic
heart of modernity, the spearhead of technique in the Western world,
and he described the increasing difficulty we experience in our
attempts to think outside it.
In 1966 he encountered the writings of the French social theorist
Jacques Ellul, who in The Technological Society presented the character
of modern technology in disturbing detail, and his review of this vol-
ume was important in extending Ellul's influence among Canadian
critics of technology. Grant now understood much better the apparent
meaninglessness of society. He was particularly moved by Ellul's
account of how technique is self-augmenting and autonomous. 'Tech-
nical progress tends to act, not according to arithmetic, but according
to a geometric progression.'21
For Ellul, technique was still a 'thing,' however dominant it had
become. As Grant pondered the writings of Heidegger, however, he
saw clearly what he had previously only intuited: technology had
become a mode of being, the ontology of the age. Grant developed
these thoughts in a speech he was invited to give to the Royal Society of
Canada. His paper, 'Knowing and Making,' was addressed to the scien-
tists who were the vanguard of technology. He warned them that they
were quite likely to be creating a monster. A new relation had arisen
between the arts and the sciences. Making, or art as it used to be
called, had been transformed by the methods and discoveries of mod-
ern science. The interdependence (Grant called it co-penetration) of
knowing and making had led to important scientific discoveries but at
the same time had made these discoveries quite outside any consider-
ation of human good. They claimed to be value free. The question that
was driving Grant, and that he painfully tried to answer, was how it was
possible even to think about goodness when the language with which
we had invoked it had been taken from us. Biotechnology was a classic
example of the feebleness of the language of good or justice in the
modern world: through it human beings could transform human
nature itself. Where was the standpoint from which we could assess this
change, know that it was good - or evil? In this address to Canada's
most distinguished scientists, Grant's appeal was passionate because it
was inspired by a real and growing fear.
The next selection was written in the 1970s and presented in slightly
different forms to many audiences before being published in 1986 in
Technology and Justice as 'Thinking about Technology.' Unlike 'Know-
26 Introduction

ing and Making,' it was intended to alert the thoughtful public, rather
than specialists. Its relevance in the 1990s is overwhelming. Those who
believed that it was still possible for human beings to control technol-
ogy would issue calming reassurances such as 'the computer does not
impose on us the way it should be used.' Grant reflected on the
thought contained in that sentence. He took it apart almost word for
word, and the result is not easily forgotten. His conclusion is that com-
puters can arise only in a particular type of society, and the fact of their
appearance against this background makes them far from neutral
instruments.
The last piece in this section is the little known 'Justice and Technol-
ogy,' originally published in a large American anthology not readily
available in Canada. (It is reprinted here with corrections and addi-
tions Grant made to the original version.) Grant says that his intention
in this article is to discuss the relation between technology and two
statements about justice: Christ's 'happy are those who are hungry and
thirsty for justice' (Matthew 5:6) and Socrates's dictum that it is better
to suffer injustice than to inflict it (Gorgias 474b).
From some points of view, these two statements would be in per-
fect harmony with technology. Grant always acknowledged that one of
the reasons for technology's triumph was that many people, begin-
ning with Francis Bacon, had believed that control over nature was
necessary in order to fulfil the biblical injunctions to be both good
stewards and good shepherds, to husband the resources of the earth
and make them prosper so that the sheep might be protected and
fed. Many of the achievements of technology did help make human
life better: penicillin healed the sick, the green revolution fed the
poor, labour-saving devices relieved people, especially women, of
much drudgery.
However, in this essay, Grant comes to terms with a terrible ambigu-
ity about technology: it 'came into the world carrying a hope about jus-
tice, [but] has in its realization dimmed the ability to think about
justice.' One may ask: Why is it so important to be able to think about
justice when technology is bringing it about in the world? Who needs
an ontology of justice, or for that matter an ontology of anything? Why
does Grant so often call 'transcendence' a dangerous word?
It is not possible to dismiss such questions. Grant makes it clear that
the most important knowledge is given us in the ordinary occurrences
of daily life, and through the concrete more readily than through
philosophical abstractions. If a word like ontology - the science of
 Introduction 27

being - excludes the immediacies of justice here and now, it has

become a dead object in the museum of our civilization, a dry aca-
demic phantom. If justice is, as both Grant and Plato believed, what
human beings are fitted for, it must be an unchanging good, which
meets us and calls to us to pay its price in the ordinary occurrences of
space and time. This hard standard for our actions is quite alien to
what is thought in technology about what is due to human beings.
The essay ends with a warning. Grant's frequent references to Plato
do not imply a turning away from the present. We need to meet tech-
nology face to face, so that we learn to know it for what it is. This
requires us to recognize what has been lost, politically and ethically, in
the coming to be of technological modernity; and Plato can help us do
that. But it is equally important to understand what good, if any, has
been found in the genesis of technology. It is the same thought as that
with which Grant ends Time as History: 'Nor should any dim apprehen-
sions of what was meant by perfection before the age of progress be
used simply as a means to negate what may have been given us of truth
and goodness in this age.

The Beautiful and the Good

In this volume, it is a particularly smooth transition from the other sec-

tions to Grant's contemplation of the beautiful and the good. This sec-
tion is not in any way separate from the preceding ones for, in most
important ways, what Grant wrote in his more austere and negative
pieces can be understood only in light of the ideas contained here.
Perhaps a more obvious title for the section would be 'Religion,' but
Grant did not like this term to describe faith. Religion, for him, was
something public, worldly, political; it was the set of basic and accepted
beliefs that held a society together. Nor did he ever write about his
'personal' faith. This silence allowed him to affect many readers who
did not share his fundamental orientation, for they could accept his
critique of technological modernity without feeling that they also had
to be committed to his view of the transcendent. However, for Grant,
reason, reverence, and love comprised a unity, and he did not write
about 'his' religion because he did not think of Christianity as a per-
sonal possession. Nor did he accept the assertion that he subscribed to
Christian 'values.' For him, Christianity was nothing less than the way
he participated, albeit always imperfectly, in reality. Perhaps this is why
so many of his sentences end rather awkwardly with a form of the verb
28 Introduction

'to be,' as in such phrases as 'the understanding of what is.' The

absence of personal affirmation might strike some readers as a mark of
a cold intellectualism, a denial of the human; but Grant did not need
to be reminded by Simone Weil that the God that Christians worship is
the same one who causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the
just and the unjust alike. He was aware always of what Plato calls 'the
very real difference between the necessary and the good.'
The coupling here of the word 'beautiful' with the word 'good'
should not suggest any hint of a religion of aestheticism, which was
abhorrent to him. Nor is the 'beautiful' used in the subjective sense of
approval, meaning little more than 'nice' or T like that.' Rather it is
used in a precise Platonic way, either as a synonym for the Good itself
(as in Plato's Symposium), or as an image of that Good (as in the Phae-
drus). Because we are situated in a world where we cannot contemplate
this Good directly and without distraction, it is necessary for us to
approach it through its presence in the world as the Beautiful. One
thing that is common to these pieces is the persistent note of hope,
though it is a hope that recognizes that in the contemporary world the
Good and the Beautiful are often most obvious in their absence, rather
than their presence. Grant, as he always insisted, could never despair
or be a pessimist, because such a stance towards existence was forbid-
den to a Christian.
Although Grant is known as a philosopher, he often experienced
the world as a poet does, and some of his best prose has a poetic qual-
ity. The sonnet with which this section begins, however, is the only
poem Grant published. 'Good Friday' celebrates the suffering and
death of the perfectly just man. It treats the crucifixion rather than the
resurrection of Christ. Grant thought that too many Christians cele-
brate Easter in a triumphalist mood. In contrast, Grant believed that it
is not miraculous power that is of most significance to us, but the love
with which the broken Christ asks his Father to forgive those who are
torturing him. The amazingly concentrated line, 'His glance on
Golgotha our sun for seeing,' is not an academic's reference to a Pla-
tonic metaphor (the Sun in the Republic 507-8), but Grant's instinctive
use of Plato's imagery as the most comprehensive way he could find of
summing up reality as he experienced it. Though written relatively
early, this poem expresses a belief that lasted throughout Grant's life
and which may be described as a theology of the cross. It is a celebra-
tion of the beautiful and the good, though in full awareness of 'the
price of goodness in the face of evil.'23
 Introduction 29

With the next essay, 'A Platitude,' we return to the subject of tech-
nology. Why was it not put with the other writings on that subject? It is
here because of the lucid note of hope with which it ends. We live in
the dynamo of the technological world all around us. Yet many of us
are aware that we lack certain things that were once considered neces-
sary to a fully human life. How can we be aware of such deprivations
unless we somehow remember the good that we now lack? As Grant
had put it in Lament for a Nation: '"I cannot but remember such things
were / That were most precious to me." In Mozart's great threnody,
the Countess sings of la memoria di quel bene. One cannot argue the
meaninglessness of the world from the facts of evil, because what could
evil deprive us of, if we had not some prior knowledge of good?'24
These intimations are precious and should be treasured, because they
may be the way that the good for human beings, unspeakable in public
terms in the contemporary world, may yet appear to us in the darkness
of our situation. They may even lead us to see the beautiful as the
image, in the world, of the good.
In the article 'Jelte Kuipers - An Appreciation' the Beautiful and the
Good is present in terms of one particular individual. This was a beau-
tiful young man at the height of his potentiality for action and thought.
He married a woman of his own calibre and a few weeks later was killed
in a chance road accident. The distance between the necessary and the
good leaves us, as it often does, with unanswerable questions.
In an early writing Grant had put forward as descriptive of religion,
or of a religious experience, the act of loving someone (or something)
with a love that does not want them to be in the slightest degree differ-
ent from what they are. He ended by asking: 'How do we make the reli-
gious act of not having it otherwise, that somebody we would not have
otherwise - should be mortal?'20
The book review of Torture in Greece might seem out of place here,
rather than in the section on politics and morality. Is it merely para-
doxical to put it under the Beautiful and the Good? No, because Grant
understood clearly that torture is a thing supremely ugly, a thing in
which the Good does not participate in any way. Just as we could not
know what evil is without some idea of the good of which it deprives us,
so our vision of the good may be sharpened by remembering its most
appalling absence. In Philosophy in the Mass Age, Grant related a
thought experiment. Suppose a man had hidden a hydrogen bomb in

'The recollection of that good.' Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro.

30 Introduction

a large city, set to explode at a certain hour. If the police captured

him, and he would not speak, should they torture his children if that
would lead to his confession and would save thousands of lives?26 Tor-
ture, whether for reasons of political prudence or for any other appar-
ent necessity, passes beyond the limits of the permissible.
Although Grant recognized that goodness and justice are often
experienced as absence in the modern West, he also knew that others
had approached the Good less obliquely. Grant, only half-jokingly,
described himself as standing on the extreme Hindu wing of Christian-
ity, and he was delighted when his former student, Bithika Mukerji,
asked him to write the foreword to her book Neo-Vedanta and Modernity.
For Grant, Plato was the Western thinker whose thought was closest to
the Vedanta, the ancient Indian scriptures. Dr Mukerji studied for
many years the impact of Westernization on Indian thought and
indeed on all religious and philosophical traditions from before the
age of progress.
Grant was particularly interested in Mukerji's account of Ananda,
usually translated as Bliss, which is a central attribute of the divine in
the Vedanta. For us 'the ontology (or being) of Ananda is a daunting
phrase, because in our tradition bliss or joy is purely subjective and has
no reality outside our feelings. Therefore, it is hard to think of bliss as
having an ontology. Grant suggests that there is a need felt in our
Western world for a joy that is more than transient and is somehow
grounded in the nature of things. From this we may get a glimpse of
what Mukerji thinks is threatened in her tradition. We may also get a
glimpse of what Grant meant when he said that Mozart's music had a
supernatural model. An extract from Grant's foreword appears under
the title 'Bliss.'
We end this reader with Grant's most positive and powerful state-
ment. As he explained to a young admirer: 'For the first time in my life
I have tried to express Christianity [around] a wonderful sentence of
Simone Weil's that "Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illu-
minated by love." I am sorry that some of my writings have made you
"gloomy." Hope is a great virtue but I do not think it should be.con-
centrated on the events of this world but on the eternal order.'27 'Faith
and the Multiversity' is a deep meditation on Weil's sentence and it
amounts to nothing less than a refutation of modernity understood as
technology. Seen either as a mode of understanding or as a mode of
being, technology is shown to be radically incomplete and fundamen-
tally inadequate because it ignores the existence of love in the world.
 Introduction 31

This writing is also Grant's clearest account of why he so often pref-

aced the word Christianity with the qualification 'Western.' By the time
one has fully assimilated this difficult essay, one has a better idea of
what Christianity without the qualification meant to him. It brings
together what he thought about love with his thoughts about the beau-
tiful. His devotion to Plato's thought is reaffirmed, and so is his rejec-
tion of Nietzsche. His fundamental disagreement with Heidegger is, as
usual, combined with a deeply respectful admission of his greatness.
In his last years, Grant was busy preparing to start his projected book
defending Plato and Christianity from Heidegger's attack. Often he
would write down the thoughts that occurred to him in preparation
for the task. Most of these were in folders with the words 'Notes on the
Good' scribbled on the front. Looking at these soon after his death, a
friend observed: 'All his work could be summed up as "Notes on the
Good."'

A Comment on the Texts

In editing the selections a number of minor stylistic changes were

made to the original texts. In the case of previously published material,
spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been standardized.
However, letters have been treated as historical documents and so gen-
erally retain all the original spelling, punctuation, and so on. The edi-
tors' notes are in the form of unnumbered footnotes, while Grant's
original notes appear as numbered notes at the end of the selection.

NOTES

1 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto:
Oxford University Press 1990), 32.
2 A narrow local inlet of the ocean.
3 Highest good.
4 George Grant to Murray Tolmie, 29 March 1954, in George Grant Selected Let-
ters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 185.
5 George Grant personal papers, Halifax, N.S.
6 Louis Greenspan, 'George Grant Remembered,' TaPanta, vol. 6:1.
7 Quoted in William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press 1993), 271.
32 Introduction

8 Hugh Segal, No Surrender: Reflection of a Happy Warrior in the Tory Crusade

(Toronto: HarperCollins 1996), 9.
9 George Grant, 'Religion and the State,' in Technology and Empire (Toronto:
House of Anansi 1969), 43.
10 George Grant, unpublished talk to students at McMaster University, Grant
personal papers.
11 George Grant to Maude Grant, spring 1952, in Selected Letters, 174-5.
12 George Grant, unpublished lecture, 1977-8, Grant personal papers.
13 Leo Strauss, 'What Is Political Philosophy?' in What Is Political Philosophy and
Other Studies (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press 1959), 55.
14 George Grant to Joan O'Donovan, 4Jan. 1981, in Selected Letters, 312.
15 George Grant, Time as History, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press 1995), 58.
16 George Grant to Joan O'Donovan, 1982, in Selected Letters, 324.
17 George Grant to Maude Grant, autumn 1951, Grant-Parkin Papers, MG 30
D59, National Archives of Canada.
18 George Grant to Maude Grant, 1952, ibid.
19 George Grant to Dennis Lee, 22 Dec. 1976, in Selected Letters, 296.
20 George Grant to Dennis Lee, November 1983, in ibid., 336. Though Grant
never completed his book on Celine, interested readers should consult
George Grant, 'Celine's Trilogy,' ed. S.V. Grant, in George Grant and the Sub-
version of Modernity, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press
1996).
21 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf and Knopff 1965)
59.
22 George Grant, Time as History (Toronto: University Press 1995) 68.
23 George Grant, 'Faith and the Multiversity,' in Technology and Justice
(Toronto: House of Anansi: 1986) 42.
24 George Grant, Lament (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1997) 3.
25 Grant, private papers.
26 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, ed. William Christian (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press 1995), 85.
27 George Grant to David Llwellyn Dodds, 11 Nov. 1986 in Selected Letters, 361.
 PROLOGUE

Although Grant had studied at Oxford, the home of analytical philosophy, he

always thought that philosophy was the study of the highest matters — the mystery
of existence and how each human being should live his or her life. And although
it was a difficult and: demanding study, it was open to every human being to love
the Good and to seek it.

What Is Philosophy? (1954)

I want to try to describe what philosophy is. My job is to teach philoso-

phy to youngsters. Just what is this subject that we try to teach them, and
which is taught at all the universities of the world? Why is it that in all
the great civilizations there have always been philosophers and that
indeed we often judge the greatness of a society by the greatness of its
philosophy?
The word philosophy comes from two Greek words, love and wis-
dom. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Now most of us have
some knowledge of what it is to love. Parents love their children - that
is, the children are infinitely precious to them. Some of us at our
worst moments love money in the same way. Money is what is infi-
nitely precious to us. That is, to love somebody in the real sense,
not the Hollywood sense, is to say that that person is not of relative
but of absolute worth to one. People who love themselves think
themselves of absolute worth. They are for themselves the centre of
the universe.
But if it is fairly easy from our own experience to say what love is, it is
far more difficult to know what we mean by the word wisdom. It is
indeed quite easy to say what wisdom is not. It is not, for instance,
knowledge in any specialized sense. We know people who have a great
deal of knowledge about mathematics or medicine, of fixing radios or
selling insurance, who despite that knowledge we would not call wise.

Unpublished, 1954. George Grant personal papers, Halifax.

34 Prologue: What Is Philosophy?

The great atomic scientist in the United States, Dr Oppenheimer,

obviously is a man of vast knowledge, but nobody who has followed his
career could easily call him a wise man. Just like Einstein, outside his
specialized knowledge field of physics he talks like a child. On the other
hand, most of us have met people who have very little specialized
knowledge and who one would yet call wise. For instance, I know a
retired minister in Halifax who is no great specialist in any field but is
one of the wisest men I have ever met.^
Now I think that gives us the clue to what wisdom is. We call people
wise if they know how to live - if they know what is important in living.
And when we speak about living we mean something to do with the
whole of the person - that which goes to the very roots of an individ-
ual's life. And that is what we mean when we say philosophy is the love
of wisdom. It is the desire to seek that which will give purpose and
meaning and unity to life. That is the difference between philosophic
and scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is always concerned
with some part or aspect of life; philosophic knowledge is always con-
cerned with the whole of human existence.
In other words, philosophy begins when we ask the questions: 'How
should I live? What is life for? Why do I exist in the world?' Now of
course for many people such questions as these do not arise as real
questions. They think they know what life is really for. They think they
know what is important. For instance, in North America today more
and more people think they are certain what is of prime importance to
living. It is to get more money, to buy a more expensive house, to have
wider and more varied pleasures, to be a social success — that is what is
known as getting on in the world. Once one has got a Chevrolet, get an
Oldsmobile; once one has got an Oldsmobile, get a Buick. Among such
people - and of course this kind of mood is present in all of us - there
is little desire for wisdom, little desire to think what life is about. The
practical getting on in the world is their philosophy - so they don't feel
the need to think further.
In a nobler and deeper way the same thing is true of people who are

Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), director of the Manhattan Project and known as the
father of the atomic bomb.
The Reverend J.W.A. Nicholson, a retired United Church clergyman, who had earned,
in Grant's eyes, a certain cachet because the United Church had once tried him for
heresy.
 Prologue: What Is Philosophy? 35

held very simply by some clearly defined religion. If they take that reli-
gion seriously it tells them directly what is important about living. It
gives them such certainty that they feel no need to think deeply about
the meaning of life - that is, to ask philosophic questions. They live in
tradition. And when I speak about religion I do not mean only as
ancient and wise a tradition as Christianity. It is equally true of the great
political religions of the twentieth century. In Soviet Russia, for
instance, there is practically no philosophy, for the religion of commu-
nism provides for many people a simple Sunday school faith which tells
them how to live.
Philosophy is for those who have moved beyond any simple certainty.
It is for those who have come face to face with the mystery of existence
and who have seen how profound a mystery it is. Philosophy is the
attempt to fathom that profundity - that is, to find the wisdom which
will enable us to live as we ought.
Now the sense of mystery arises for people in two ways; first from just
plain wonder at the world around them, and secondly from the
anguish of their own lives. That glorious man Plato - the greatest of all
philosophers - said once that philosophy begins in wonder. We look at
the immense spaces of the night - the worlds beyond worlds beyond
worlds that the astronomers tell us about, and how can we not wonder
what it is all for, where it all came from? We look at human history - at
all the vast numbers of civilizations and billions of people who have
existed, the traces of whom have entirely disappeared from the world -
and we ask what human life is for. Certainly it exists in all children.
When I say to my six-year-old daughter that God made the world, she
looks up in wonder to ask who then made God. When we meet a blind
person my four-year-old son^ asks why did God make some people
blind — or why did God make mosquitos or sharks? Of course, the
tragedy is that we kill that wonder in our children. We fill them with
complacent conventional opinions and tame them to accept unques-
tioningly. We make them adjusted little members of the ant commu-
nity. But still that spontaneous wonder in children is evidence that it is
deeply in all of us. It is just our humanity that we desire to know, and
that desire to know is the very root of philosophy.

Rachel Grant.
William Grant.
36 Prologue: What Is Philosophy?

Of course, this sense of mystery comes to us not only in this natural

spontaneous way - but also arises in the anguish and suffering which is
so near the heart of all our lives. This anguish arises for us when people
we love are dead or going to die - when we face the fact that inescap-
ably we too must die. It faces us in all the suffering we undergo when we
are disappointed in what we have desperately wanted. It arises for us
most deeply in the guilt and shame we rightly feel when we have treated
some other person cruelly or let some other person down. That is,
when we see our shoddy little selves for what we truly are.
Most of us will try to do anything to avoid that anguish. We will do
anything to forget that someday we shall die; we try to push aside the
thought that we have treated people unfairly, by dubbing all our guilts
'neurotic.' We try to surround ourselves with pleasant thoughts - the
next cigarette, the next dance, the next promotion, the next act of love.
But inescapably the fact of our situation is there. At some moment -
perhaps when we lie awake at night, perhaps when we are in pain, per-
haps when we face the fact that somebody we love has no real care for
us, perhaps even at our greatest moments of happiness when we know
this happiness is bound to pass - at such moments we admit our situa-
tion and experience anguish. The whole mystery of human existence
arises for us and we start to philosophize - to fathom that mystery in
thought. For instance, these days if any of us really face what the cobalt
bomb may mean - that human existence perhaps will cease to exist on
this planet - that is, you and I and our children - we might really begin
to face that mystery. Has the human story then been meaningless? Is my
life, are my children's lives meaningless? It is in such moments that phi-
losophy in its deepest sense arises.
Of course, the practical man will say, get on with the job - why think
about such things - earn your living, bring up your family, do your duty,
make the world more comfortable for other people. All one can say in
answer to such practical people is that those who feel this anguish, meet
this mystery, have no alternative to philosophy. It is what God has called
them to do. Perhaps we may say even more. After all, an ape or a bee
gets on with the job, earns his living, procreates and cares for his chil-
dren, accepts his existence, adjusts to his society. Only man is capable
of this attempt to understand the mystery of existence. It is only man
who can rebel, feel anguish, think. Perhaps then in a very real sense, it
is the ability to philosophize which gives man his real dignity, which
makes him more valuable than a clever ape. One of the finest philoso-
 Prologue: What Is Philosophy? 37

phers of all time, a Frenchman named Pascal, once expressed this bril-
liantly. He said: 'Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but a
thinking reed. It does not need the universe to take up arms to crush
him; a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But, though the
universe should crush him, a man would still be nobler than his
destroyer, because he knows that he is dying, knows that the universe
has got the better of him; the universe knows nothing of this.'
This means that philosophy is something inescapable to being a
man. It is an activity rooted in the very nature of our humanity - not a
pleasant academic exercise reserved for a few professors and students
in a university. The farmer must find himself as much as the teacher;
the businessman as much as the coal miner. It also means that philoso-
phy is something that a man must do for himself. Nobody can make
another man's philosophy for him. Other people can grow our food for
us; other people can make our atom bombs for us; somebody else can
cure us when we are sick - but nobody else can do our thinking for us.
This is the ultimate truth of freedom. A man must do his own believing
as he does his own dying.
This indeed takes me to one of the most commonly heard criticisms
of philosophy - that there is no development in it, as, for instance,
there is in the progressive development of the natural sciences. Sci-
ence, it is said, is always growing in knowledge, philosophy is not. But to
say this is to miss the whole point of philosophy- to fail to see what it is.
It is not concerned with how men manipulate the public objects of the
world - it is concerned with the journey of each individual's mind into
the infinite. Therefore, philosophy must be lived through again and
again in the life of each person. In science we are further ahead than
the ancient Greeks or people at the time of Jesus. But philosophically
our minds are not far ahead of the minds of Socrates or Jesus. Indeed,
even the best of us only begin to touch at the hem of their garments.
We must live through the same thought, the same agony they lived
through, if we are to come to the majesty of their wisdom. That is why
there is no progress in philosophy as there is in science. It is an activity
which each new generation - indeed each new person - must live
through for himself that he may find the ultimate vision for himself.
This, again, is the very truth of freedom.
Another commonly heard criticism, related to this one and based on

Blaise Pascal (1623-62), Pensees, §vi.347.

38 Prologue: What Is Philosophy?

the same misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy, is the old cry:

all philosophies contradict each other. Philosophy is blamed for being
at once too diverse and too much the same. But in fact the major phi-
losophies seldom contradict each other on fundamentals; the effect of
doing so is a result of necessary differences of standpoints, emphasis,
and idiom.
The way I have described philosophy has been as a very intimate and
personal activity - something dealing with the core of the human mind.
Of course, in the university it is presented to students in a more formal
way. We try to put before the students what has been most illuminating
in the great philosophizing of the past. The students study the writings
that incorporate the fullest wisdom of the greatest philosophers. This
study of the past is necessary, for, after all, each generation does not
come into a new world - it comes into a world made rich by the tradi-
tion of the ages. Therefore, one of the things a man must do if he is to
be wise himself is to partake of all that accumulation of wisdom. This
study of the history of philosophy is the raw material out of which men
can begin to build a philosophy of their own. Any man who has even
elementary humility will want to find out what Aristotle and St Paul,
Kant and Calvin said about a problem, and see in the great man's solu-
tion of that problem the beginnings of a solution of his own.
For instance, to such a central problem as 'what is truth?' we cannot
expect any easy answer, and we need all the help we can get from those
in the past who have had clearer minds and greater vision than our-
selves. Do you remember Francis Bacon's wonderful description of the
meeting between Pilate and Jesus. '"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate
and would not wait for an answer.' If we are not willing to wait for
answers in philosophy, if we are not willing to learn from the wisdom of
the past, how can we expect to get anything but a cheap answer to the
problem 'What is truth?' And if we have a cheap answer to such a prob-
lem we are liable to have a cheap life. Indeed, it is the superficial flip
way that we on this continent are bringing up our youngsters to have no
respect for the wisdom of the past and to say that truth is what works
and teaching them our rushing resdess life, which makes one wonder
what is going to happen to our society. In fact, one of our major trage-
dies is how little true philosophy there is amongst us. In our personal
life, wisdom as an ideal is more and more replaced by success and
wealth and adjustment. In our universities philosophy is being replaced

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Essays, I, 'Of Truth.'

 Prologue: What Is Philosophy? 39

by the study of natural science and useful techniques - studies that are
popular because they lead to comfort and power. It is a sad fact but it
must be admitted that we are a continent which has almost entirely
given up the idea of philosophy.
Yet we must never despair for none of us is a slave to our society. The
life of philosophy is open to all of us. And its reward is in truth infinite.
For as we face the mystery of existence and pass in thought beyond a
superficial view of the world, there will come to us, out of the mystery
and the anguish, the certainty which is rooted not in foolishness but in
truth. There will come to us indeed God - not God as he is so often
thought of, as an insurance policy for the next world, or as a comfort-
ing drug - but God in his real and terrible presence. For that is finally
what philosophy is - the practice of the presence of God.
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 Parti
Politics and Morality
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 THE CHARACTER OF CANADA

Grant's grandfathers, Sir George Parkin and Principal G.M. Grant, were
active in the Imperial Federation movement in the last two decades of the nine-
teenth century; they believed that Canada could not survive as an independent
nation in North American without the counterweight of the British empire.
Between 1943 and 1945, while Grant worked for the Canadian Association for
Adult Education, he prepared two pamphlets exploring Canada's post-war
future in a world, that, looked likely to be dominated by the superpower rivalry of
the United States and the Soviet Union. These excerpts from The Empire: Yes
or No? explore many of the themes that he would develop in his political writ-
ings over the next twenty years, culminating in Lament for a Nation in
1965.

The Empire: Yes or No? (1945)

The origin of Canada as a nation is in the British North America Act J

And in the name of that Act we see indeed the main forces that have
shaped our country. British, yes, and North American too; and from
the amalgam of these two influences has come the Canada of today.
The particular Canadianism, that we feel from the grey streets of Hali-
fax to the foothills near Banff, from the wide horizons of the prairies to
the lakes and rivers of the Algonquin Park, has been created from these
two sources. Yes, Canada as a nation can truly be called British North
America.
Today, however, there are in our midst certain English- and French-
speaking citizens who decry the significance of our membership in
the British Commonwealth. There are others, more numerous, who
though paying lip service to the Commonwealth, belie their attach-
ment to it in their activities or their apathy. It is necessary, therefore,
that these Canadians who believe deeply in the value of the Common-
wealth, for Canada and for the world, should reiterate their faith in it -

George Grant, The. Empire: Yes or No? (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1945).
Now called the Constitution Act, 1867.
44 Politics and Morality

the faith that not only for the progress of the civilized world, but also
for the existence of our nation as a free and democratic state, our mem-
bership in the Commonwealth is essential. Indeed, our reasons for
remaining in the Commonwealth are not based on colonialism, or
attachment to the past, but on the cold logic of the present. In this year
1945, every interest of Canada demands that we should remain inti-
mately attached to the other British nations.
The first job in seeing our role in the British Commonwealth must be
to look at what is happening in the world today. The first fact of the
world today is that the United Nations have won complete victory over
the forces of the fascist axis. This coalition of United Nations now
comes out of the war as a possible nucleus for future world order. The
gradual and organic development of the United Nations, from a mere
coalition of powers in 1942 towards greater and greater unity, has spo-
ken well for the sagacity of its leaders. In this the atomic age the failure
of world order is too appalling to contemplate.

Imperialism

But though the first and most hopeful fact of the modern world is this
developing new world order, let us not blind ourselves to the fact that
the development of this world order into perfection will not happen
overnight, and that every step of the way will be fraught with dangers
and difficulties. Only if we recognize how difficult the job will be, shall
we be clear enough and tough enough to accomplish it. The creation
of the United Nations will by no means take us over into an ideal world.
Friction between great and small powers will still remain. Self-interest
and self-complacency will continue to beset nations and groups of
nations, as they have beset individual men and nations in the past.
Merely by vaguely inveighing against such words as imperialism and
power politics we will not destroy them. By the very nature of life itself,
power exists. By the very existence of life, it will be necessary to balance
the stresses and strains of that power within the United Nations. Only if
we recognize this will we be able to move forward gradually to the more
perfect world order we desire.
The three great dominating powers of the world after the war will be
three great empires. The two immense continental empires of the
U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R, and the maritime empire of Great Britain.
 The Character of Canada 45

There will be other powers. Perhaps in the near future France will
return to its former noble stature, or China and India will become
other great empires. But at the moment there is little doubt that these
three are the mainspring of the United Nations. The U.S.A. will
remain the dominant power in this hemisphere, and in most of the
Pacific. The U.S.S.R. clearly is going to hold and expand its imperial
sway from Central Europe to the Far East. The British Empire and
Commonwealth will continue to encircle the globe. However much
people may inveigh against such imperialism, in this spring of 1945, it
is clearly the emergent pattern.

The Necessity for a Third Power

But whereas the British Commonwealth and Empire help to mitigate

continental regionalism by its world-wide nature, and at the same time
cannot be just another power bloc, it is still in the realities of the
present political situation the only group of nations with sufficient
unity of purpose that can prevent a world organization from being
totally dominated by the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. Without the British
Commonwealth, the world organization will fall into two opposing
camps.
For though the British Commonwealth is decentralized, it still has
enough unity within itself to stand as a power between these two colossi.
And power split three ways will surely be a much safer preserver of the
peace than power divided between Washington and Moscow. The tri-
umvirs of Rome in the dim past recognized that power was better
divided three ways than two. For two always meant a division into two
decided and hostile camps. Three means a more even balance.
So in the world we are coming into, it will be much safer to have, as
well as Washington and Moscow, a third force like the British Common-
wealth to stand with a firm heart in the councils of the world, and to
keep it as strong as possible. For, it must be repeated, a world in which
Washington and Moscow were supreme would be a world in which one
empire controlled the Eurasian heartland and another the Americas,
and no power on earth stood between them. It is as clear as crystal that
we are moving in that direction today. Only the free maritime Com-
monwealth is sufficiently strong to prevent that division of power
46 Politics and Morality

between them. Surely it is important that such a Commonwealth

should exist as an effective body.

What Does This Mean for Canada?

It must be clearly stated that if the world is divided between Washing-

ton and Moscow (and the situation is sufficiently imminent not to be a
mere bogeyman), nobody would have more to lose than Canada.
For if such an immense tragedy as conflict between these powers
should take place, it would not take place in some distant corner of the
globe, but on our own soil. Canada has indeed in the last years become
the potential cockpit of the world, as Belgium was thirty years ago. As
our north and south connections run to the U.S.A., so they run across
the Pole to Moscow. As our east and west connections join us together,
so they carry us towards Siberia and Asia in the east and to Great Britain
and Europe in the west. We would be at the very centre of the conflict
between the two great continental empires. It is clearly in our most
direct and immediate interest to prevent that. If we do not, we will be
caught like the nut in the nutcracker.
Our best means of preventing that tragedy is our continued member-
ship in the Commonwealth. Cut off from the British nation, as an inde-
pendent country, we would have little alternative but to join South
American nations in the hemispheric empire of the U.S.A. And as part
of that we would be strengthening the power of the U.S.A. to retire into
isolation. We would be abetting its ability to establish an anti-Russian
bloc. We would be increasing the chances for an American-Soviet con-
flict. On the other hand, as a member of the Commonwealth, we would
be doing exactly the opposite. Friendly to the U.S.A., we would still not
be her satellite. By our world-wide interest, we would, as her chief
neighbour, be pulling her out of continental isolation and towards
effective commitments to a world order.

Practical Decisions Must Be Made

Those people who wish Canada to retire from the British Common-
wealth and Empire, and thereby greatly weaken that great organiza-
tion, should think of a world in which it did not exist. What would such
a world be like?
 The Character of Canada 47

1. It would be a world in which the only free association of nations

with membership in every part of the globe did not exist. A world where
the only effective organization of free nations, cutting across regional
and hemispheric boundaries, was destroyed.
2. It would be a world where the most effective experiments in the
development of backward people towards political democracy and eco-
nomic maturity did not exist.
3. It would be a world where the mainstay of Western Christian civili-
zation did not exist. And Western Christian civilization, for all its faults,
has developed in practice, more than any other, the practical concept
of man's intrinsic and ultimate worth as an individual and the right of
mankind to be free and to develop freely towards a higher and fuller
destiny. And, as both Andre Siegfried the Frenchman, or Cohen-
Portheinv the Austrian have pointed out, Western Christian civiliza-
tion has little chance of survival if the British Commonwealth and
Empire goes down.
It was all very well for us in the 1920s and 1930s to think of the British
Empire and Commonwealth as being dismembered, and to talk glibly
of some uncertain perfection taking its place. But surely the terrible-
ness of the last years has taught us that there is a good chance that what
would take its place is not something better, but something a lot worse;
that though the Empire and Commonwealth must be improved and
many of its anachronisms wiped away, in 1940 it at least stood for a cer-
tain modicum of liberty, dignity, and decency when these values were
all but swept away. And it bore this responsibility before either of the
other two empires, the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. had accepted their
responsibility for the maintenance of freedom.

Should We Preserve Our Nationhood ?

The meaning and significance of Canada as a nation is that on the

northern half of this continent a sovereign state has been created,
friendly to the U.S.A. but essentially different. And the basic reason why

Andre Siegfried (1875-1959), author of The Race Question in Canada (1907) and Le
Canada, Les Deux Races; Problemes politiques conlemporains (1906).
Paul Cohen-Portheim (d. 1932), author of England, the Unknown hie (1935).
48 Politics and Morality

we are not part of the U.S.A. is because we have remained in the British
orbit. The U.S.A. broke its ties with Western Europe. We never did. We
kept our close connection, not alone with the United Kingdom, but
with Europe in general. It is that difference that kept us separate from
the U.S.A. It is that difference that made us a nation. It is that differ-
ence that preserved our individuality. Let us not fool ourselves. The
same factors will continue to operate in our history in the future as they
did in the past. If we have no link with the British Commonwealth we
will soon cease to be a nation and become absorbed in the U.S.A. On
the other hand, within the Commonwealth we will be able to develop
the form of government and social order that we desire.
Those who want to destroy our membership in the British Common-
wealth in the name of a greater Canadian nationhood are fooling
themselves. They are really destroying our nation. Because without that
membership no power on earth can keep us from being absorbed by
the U.S.A. And with that we cease to be a nation.

What Is Canada ?

Of course, in the final analysis this question boils down to what we con-
sider Canada to be. There are now, and have always been in the past,
two distinct versions of this. One is that it is only an unfortunate acci-
dent that we were ever created and that the sooner we join the United
States, the better. The other (and what seems to the present writer a
much nobler version) is the vision of Macdonald, Laurier, and Borden,
that on the northern half of this continent has been created a nation,
raised in a different tradition from the U.S.A. and dedicated to the
extension of certain different political and social concepts.
But what are these concepts? It is always difficult to define such
things in bald and general terms. We Canadians feel them in our daily
lives, and we see them in intimate and immediate ways. We understand
them in particular instances as they affect us, rather than rationalizing
them into generalizations. But now that they are challenged they must
be enunciated. The essential principle around which Canada has been
established is embodied in the age-old struggle in human society as to
how free each individual can be and yet live in an ordered society
where that freedom is not so abused that it infringes on the freedom of
others. Where does freedom for one person to do what he likes mean
 The Character of Canada 49

lack of freedom for other people? This conflict, so continuous in

human life, can be expressed in many ways: the relation of the one to
the many, of freedom to authority, of liberty to order. But it is the
same old question. How do individuals live together in peace and har-
mony?
The main thought of Americans on this subject has emphasized the
inalienable right of the individual to be free to do as he chooses, what-
ever effect it might have on society as a whole. We in Canada have put
the balance far more on the side of order or the good of society. The
individual has certain rights, but these rights must be strictly prevented
from causing any disruption to the society as a whole. This stress on
order in our society has been true of French as well as English Canada.
In the opening of the west, also, we saw to it that the forces of law and
order preceded settlement and did not follow it, as was often the case in
the U.S.A. The RCMP was an instrument of the central government for
maintaining order in the new territories, the like of which there never
was in the U.S.A. or any other country of this hemisphere. Now, in
modern times, on the question of wartime restrictions, for instance,
there has been a widespread realization in Canada that because these
restrictions were for the good of society as a whole they must be
accepted, and they have been. In the U.S.A. there has been widespread
attack on them as limiting the freedom of the individual.
It is unwise and presumptuous to say which balance is better - that of
the U.S.A. or that of Canada. But let us admit frankly that it is impor-
tant that this continent should have this diversity of social philosophy.
The great question of the modern world is going to be to what extent,
within the complicated pattern of industrialized civilization, freedom
and authority can be truly integrated. How far in this new and intricate
world will it be possible for men to have individual freedom without dis-
rupting too many other men by their actions? How far will men have to
be curbed by authority, so that they do not interfere with others? In
1929 the U.S.A. saw the results of complete freedom. Yet that nation
still, more than anywhere else, deifies the right of the individual to do
as he likes. In the U.S.S.R. the other extreme has been tried, wherein
the individual has been subordinated to the good of society as a whole,
and his acts are ruthlessly curbed for the sake of the general order.

We cannot judge the British Commonwealth from our petty interests

50 Politics and Morality

alone (however well these are satisfied,) but on the highest criteria of
political morality. For today in the modern world, with it more than
with any other political institution, lies the hope of Christian man, of
ethical man, of man the reasonable, moral being who stands before
God and history. One can indeed say that ethical man, reasonable man,
is a last remaining fragment of the dark ages, and that the new man is
one ruled by marxian economics or Freudian sex - a man, in fact, who
is brutal and unreasonable, unethical and material, and who is ruth-
lessly dominated by his appetites. Then we can disavow the British
Commonwealth. But if we believe in Christian man, the finest flower of
all that Western civilization has produced, then there can be no doubt
that our chief hope in the survival of such values is in the survival of the
British Commonwealth. Canada has a vital responsibility. Canada must
choose.

MASS SOCIETY

Grant continued to believe in the importance of adult education after he took his
teaching position at Dalhousie. William Grant, his father, had been active in
setting up the annual Couchiching conferences, which brought together business
people, academics, and politicians to discuss important contemporary political
and social issues, and George Grant himself addressed the conference in 1955.
On this occasion as on others, he demonstrated that among his many strengths
as a philosopher was an ability to communicate complicated ideas. A member of
the audience at Couchiching in 1955 recalled his reaction to Grant's talk:
'What I remember particularly was that this speech appeared to challenge many
fundamental theological precepts of the Christian religion — although I felt at
the end of his speech that I had never before listened to such a profoundly reli-
gious man ...It was the first time I had ever listened to anyone who seemed to be
driven by spiritual, almost mystical, imperatives which profoundly affected his
perception of the world around.' (Paul Roddick to William Christian, 25 Febru-
ary 1991).

The whole of one's effort at everything seems extremely 'sub specie atomic
bomb'; any effort must be directed to control of that. The bomb seems to
stand over one like damnation.
- George Grant to Maude Grant, 1945
 Mass Society 51

The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age 1955

I don't intend to discuss whether we are going to be blown up or

whether the human race is going to be sensible enough to survive.
Whether we are going to destroy ourselves by Intercontinental Ballistic
Missiles or slowly corrupt the very basis of our animal existence - I do
not know ... I can imagine a prosperous society, without war, of healthy
animals adjusted to worshiping their machines which could be so dis-
gusting that one could will that it should be destroyed.
Therefore what I want to talk about is the quality of mind or soul
which exists on this continent. In other words, if we aren't smashed in
an all-out fight with the Asiatics, what kind of society is developing here
at home?
The great fact of Canada today - indeed the great fact of the whole
modern world - is that we are now living in the mass scientific society
and this is something totally new in the experience of the human race.
All the forms of our life - sexual, economic, political, artistic, moral,
and above all religious - must be seen within this new situation - the
world of the big city, automation, and the atom.
When I want to think of what the mass society is, and how much it has
come to be in Canada, I think of Don Mills development in the north of
Toronto. Thousands of comfortable, simple homes thrown up within a
year from which hundreds of white-collared workers go forth to the
new clean factories and offices. A community whose centres are an
enormous Dominion store and Brewers warehouse - a community
where families are co-operative enterprises to get the latest in electrical
equipment and where children in mass schools are taught to be
adjusted to their total life situation, watch the same television pro-
grammes, drink the same drinks, and go charging around in the same
over-powered automobiles, the bumpers of which are now decorated
with phallic symbols. Now of course, not all Canada is the mass world
yet. But gradually and surely we move towards it. For instance, the farm
community, as it once existed, is bound slowly to disappear - for even if
people are farmers by profession they must become more and more
town people with the automobile, the radio and television, the
machine, and mass education. Indeed, of one thing we may be certain,

'The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age,' in Texts of Addresses Delivered at the Twenty-Fourth
Annual (^ouchiching (inference (Toronto: Canadian Institute on Public Affairs and the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1955; repr. 1985), 39-45.
52 Politics and Morality

the economy of organized obsolescence and high returns for the sales-
man, the broker, and the engineer, public technical education and
social standardization, mass stimulated sexual life and mass popular
entertainment, this is the world which must find an ever fuller incarna-
tion in Canada. I do not know what forms of the human spirit this new
world will produce - but one thing I do know - no sensible person can
believe that the same kind of people are going to come out of this envi-
ronment as came out of the old Canadian towns and farms.
Now there is no doubt that the mass society is here to stay - unless the
bombs really start falling. Nor have I any doubt about the great good it
has brought. It is obviously good that women should have automatic
washing machines; it is almost as good that we men should have cars.
The fact that machines do our work means we have more free time and
human freedom requires this time. In the old days leisure was some-
thing reserved for the privileged. Now it is open to more and more and
surely what we need for ourselves we must see as necessary for others,
and this possibility of leisure for all does involve the machine. Even
modern medicine, however much of a sacred cow it has become, we
must judge as good. Let anyone who has a child in pain doubt that.
Indeed, at the profoundest level we must welcome the mass scientific
society, despite all its horrors. For it has put us in a new relation to
nature. We can now as never before choose to make our world, to use
nature and abuse her, but less than ever before need we submit to her
as necessity. More and more life becomes an open decision of the spirit.
But let us also be certain what a terrible price is being paid all over
North America for the benefits of the mass society. And what that price
is can easily be stated. Economic expansion through the control of
nature by science has become the chief purpose of our existence. It has
become the goal to which everything else must be subordinated, the
God we worship. Indeed, for the last three hundred years there have
been a band of thinkers telling men to worship the world. Now at last in
North America this has become the dominant religion, which shapes
our society at nearly every point. What is wrong with this religion? The
plain fact that man's real purpose in life is not this. The goal of human
existence is not to be found in the world of nature - but in freedom.
Indeed, to be a man at all and not just an animal who looks like a man
but is not, is to strive to become free. And a free man is a person who is
not ruled by fear or passion - or the world around him - but by the eter-
nal world of truth and goodness which is there to be realized by every
thought and action in our lives. The freest of all men once said: T have
 Mass Society 53

overcome the world.' Arid this is what life is for, to overcome the
world, as we live in it deeply.
This is our human destiny, because our environment of nature
depends upon an absolute environment - call it if you will God - and to
live in the presence of that absolute and to judge the world by it is what
it is to be free. I do not mean by this that a free man will turn away from
the world in aloof isolation. After all, the man I have called freest lived
in no ivory tower, but met the world most directly on a cross. What I do
mean is that the free man is he who does not abandon himself to the
mood of his age, who lives at the point where the passing moments of
his life are met by the urgent present of the eternal. Such a man is not
sheer animal or, worse, a machine.
Therefore, the price we have paid for the expanding economy is that
by making it God men turn away from their proper purpose in this life.
There is nothing wrong with automobiles and washing machines, but
they must be known as simply means - means of richness of life for indi-
viduals and society.
But the expanding economy is no longer a means to us - a means for
the liberation of the spirit - it has become an end in itself and as such
is enslaving us. It so sets the tone and pattern of our society that the
standards it imposes close people off from knowing what life is for.
Look at the wives of our executives; look at the young men in the sack
suits who have taken the vow to success; look at the girls in Woolworth's
selling all day till they are exhausted and then being peddled a dream
of heaven from Hollywood and NBC. The boom world creates like an
aura its own standard of success - of what really matters in life — and
that aura lies over everything, choking people with the fear of failure in
terms of those standards, and cuts us off from any truer vision of life.
If you want to see just how much the expanding economy has
become our God read a book called Canada's Tomorrow* It is an
account of a conference in the Westinghouse Company called together
to discuss the future of our country. Leaders of all kinds from business
and labour and government, from the universities and science and
journalism were present. Well, the unanimous report of that confer-
ence was just more and more of the expanding economy - more trade,
more production, more scientific research, more people. Its motto was

Jesus, in John 16:33.

Canadian Westinghouse, Canada's Tomorrow: Papers and Discussion (Toronto: Macmillan
1954).
54 Politics and Morality

the bigger the better; or size is greatness. The book should have been
called The Messiah Machine. There was no attempt to look at what all the
expansion is for or what kind of people are produced by such a world.
It was just taken for granted that the true happiness of persons is always
to be found in short-term economic gain. No questions of quality were
asked; only questions of quantity. No ultimate questions were asked at
all. If this is Canada's tomorrow, count me out of it.
And why I mention this book is that the people at this conference
were the leaders of Canada - the men who are making our society and
whose thoughts about our future are therefore really important. If
these people think this way, this is the kind of Canada we are going to
have. For let's have no soft democratic soap. It is the powerful and the
influential who shape the short-term destiny of a country. If this 'the
bigger-the-better' spirit prevails among these educated leaders, it grad-
ually shapes all of us.
One comic side of this conference Canada's Tomorrow was that
though there was the usual talk about the dangers of communism and
Russia, the kind of society outlined at it doesn't seem very different
from the society the Russian leaders are building for their people. If a
conference of this sort had been called among Russian managers and
university presidents and officials, the pattern of Soviet Tomorrow
would probably have been very much the same - the same quantitative
judgment of success.
Indeed, one of the communist myths which most of our businessmen
and government leaders wholeheartedly accept - though they would
loathe it to be known as a marxist myth - is 'seek ye first the kingdom of
the boom and all shall be added unto you.' What they say is that eco-
nomic development must come first and it will inevitably bring in its
trail the pursuit of truth and beauty. Indeed, the very words 'truth and
beauty' are seldom used now to denote realities, but rather a confused
blend of sentiment and culture. Nice for those who have the time, but
less real than the 'hard facts of life' - 'the business of living.' Just as it
takes a while for the new rich to learn to spend their money with taste,
so it will take time for culture to flower in our new rich society. Like
much marxist theory, this is so much liberal illusion. What should be
perfectly obvious is that if you pursue economic prosperity at the
expense of everything else, what you will get is economic prosperity at
the expense of everything else.
To see our minds in the atomic age, it is particularly necessary to look
at our schools, our universities, and our churches. For the schools, the
 Mass Society 55

universities, and the churches are the chief institutions which can lead
men to freedom in the truth. Love and art, thought and prayer are after
all the activities which distinguish men from the other beasts, and it is
the school, the university, and the church upon which we are chiefly
dependent for stimulation of these activities. Our political and eco-
nomic institutions have a function which is largely negative - they exist
to prevent bad things happening: the schools and universities and
churches have the positive role, they exist to stimulate the good.
Now our schools have been going through a terribly difficult period.
When I criticize them I do not mean to lay all the blame on any partic-
ular shoulders. All of us, our ancestors and ourselves, are corporately
involved in the guilt of what our schools have become. The mass dem-
ocratic society has insisted on mass education. This, of course, has been
the only possible and right course. But let us have no doubt that this
process has meant a falling away of quality. What has happened is that
the schools have been trying to carry on their job in a society which by
and large does not think that education is important. What parents in
the mass society are interested in is that their children should be fitted
for success and adjustment, not educated. And what has been particu-
larly sad is that so many educational administrators have not only given
in to that pressure but have accepted the philosophy of worldly success
and adjustment as a true account of what the schools are for. This is
where I agree one hundred percent with Hilda Neatby. The accep-
tance by so many educationalists of the philosophy of John Dewey^ has
in general meant the surrender by the teacher and the school of their
proper function. If you say with Dewey that the intellect is solely a ser-
vant of social living, then you are saying that human beings have no
transcendent purpose beyond society - no need for liberation of the
mind. Indeed, such liberation is now no longer considered even a
respectable goal. How can it be, since it is almost the exact opposite of
the adjustment which the psychologists and the progressive educators
teach us to aspire to? Nowadays, who really minds about prejudices,
illusions, myths, and superstitions as long as they are the right ones, the

Hilda Neatby (1904-75) called for a return to basics in primary school education in her
controversial So Little for the Mind (1953).
John Dewey (1859-1952), American educationalist and philosopher. He was a member
of the pragmatist school, which treated education as a training for problem solving. His
best-known works include The, School and Society (1899) and Experience and Education
(1938).
56 Politics and Morality

socially acceptable ones, the mentally healthy ones, the good Canadian
ones?
What is meant by successful democratic living is conformity to the
lowest common denominator of desire in our society. With such a phi-
losophy the schools exist to pander to that mediocrity of desire rather
than to lead children to know what is truly worth desiring. No wonder
school teaching is a despised and underpaid profession. Teachers are
seen as servants of the desires of the multitude.
To go a step downward, the surrender of the universities to the boom
spirit is overwhelming. I watch it every day of my life. Universities are
now places where young people can insure their entrance into the pros-
perous part of society by learning some technique, and where staff
employees (once known as professors) increase the scope of some
immediately useful technique. Intellect is respected, if at all, as a tool
which can help one to do certain things in the world more efficiently. It
is no longer valued for its relation to its proper object, truth. For there
is no truth which it concerns us to know, there is only the truth with
which we are concerned to do things. Indeed, three powerful forces in
our society, business, government, and the democratic many, all have
used their power to kill the university as a place of truth seeking and
turn it into a successful technological institute. The businessmen who
rule our universities naturally see them as places to perpetuate in the
young the desires of the market place and of competition. Govern-
ments break down the balance of the university by encouraging those
studies useful for defence and prosperity. It would be foolish, for
instance, to blame the government for setting up the National
Research Council - an institution perfectly valid in itself - but let us
face the consequences of its existence for the university and the nation.
It means we are channelling our ablest students into a narrow training
in physical science and this will mean finally a nation which knows
nothing else and believes there is nothing more to know but this. Per-
haps the disappearance of the liberal university was an inevitable
accompaniment of the expanding economy but let us not fool our-
selves as to what this disappearance means to the kind of world that is
coming into existence.
Last and saddest we come to the churches. Let me say immediately
that when I speak of the churches I speak only of my own tradition, the
Protestant. And here we come to the heart of the matter. For what
men believe to be ultimately true is what makes them what they are and
through them their society. And Protestantism is the basic issue
 Mass Society 57

because North America has been more deeply formed by Protestantism

than by any other influence. Indeed, the central riddle of our history is
why Protestantism, centred as it was on a great affirmation of freedom
and the infinite, has been the dominant force in shaping a society
which is now so little free and so little aware of the infinite. To answer
that riddle is not possible here, but what must be said clearly is that
whatever the present outward success of Protestantism, it is faced by a
deep inward failure. That inward failure is seen in the fact of its surren-
der to become a tame confederate of the mass secular society. The ideal
minister has become the active democratic organizer who keeps the
church going as a place of social cohesion and positive thinking a la
Norman Vincent Peale. If he can promote building, increase organiza-
tion, provide inspiration on Sunday and convince young people that
there are more socially acceptable activities than sex and drinking, he is
a success. Best of all, if he knows a little empirical psychology, he will
understand that when a church member gets into real spiritual difficul-
ties he should be sent to a psychiatrist (the man who can really get
things done in the world of the spirit). What is, however, wrong about
it is that it is a soft substitute for the real work of the church, which is to
teach people through thought and prayer and worship to seek the ulti-
mate truth, and to live by it. In my opinion, to this, their real job, the
Protestant churches are largely indifferent.
I do not want to be pessimistic, but when asked to give a diagnosis,
one must be honest. Nothing has done us more harm in Canada than
that aura of self-congratulation with which we surround ourselves. 'This
great country of ours' or the 'Kitimar and democracy' routine which
now goes the rounds in pulpits, service clubs, and political platforms.
'Take what you want, said God, take it and pay for it.' + Let us not doubt
what we have wanted, what we have taken, and how we are paying for it.
Of course, this is not to say that we can or should turn back from the
technological society. What I am saying is that the great job in Canada
now does not lie in further economic expansion and quantitative
progress, but in trying to bring quality and beauty of existence into that

An American popular psychologist and author of the best-selling book The Power of Posi-
tive Thinking (New York: Prentice-Hall 1952).
Kitimat in British Columbia was the site of a major aluminum smelter built by Alcan.
In Technology and Justice, Grant describes this as a Spanish proverb. He first mentions it in
his /ournalof 1942. See George, Grant: Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press 1996), 106.
58 Politics and Morality

technological world - to try and make it a place where richness of life

may be discovered. And of course some people in Canada are realizing
this in their lives right now. I think of a brilliant architect who is not
interested in making a fortune but in seeing how the city of Toronto
can be more than an efficient machine of sewers and superhighways,
rather a place in which human beings can lead a good life. I think of
ministers who are making their churches places of adoration rather
than issuers of eternal insurance policies. I think of the man who runs
a small garage where the repairing of cars is made a work of excellence
and interest rather than greed. I think of young people who have the
courage to be schoolteachers when to the world it is a mark of their fail-
ure. I think of people in broadcasting and TV who use all their intelli-
gence and integrity to see that these instruments are used for the
dissemination of truth. I think of artists who give themselves to reality
and beauty rather than quick financial success. I think of philosophers
who practise the presence of God.
Whether freedom and love will be realized in the technological
world who can tell? Or will our society pour into its emptiness the bare
idea of pleasure in all its manifold, fascinating, and increasingly per-
verted forms - till force and mediocrity come entirely to rule us?
I do not want to be pessimistic. However, what is certain, beyond
doubt, is that whether we live at the end of the world or at the dawn of
a golden age or neither, it still counts absolutely to each one of us that
in and through the beauty and anguish, the good and evil of the world,
we come in freedom upon the joy unspeakable.

EQUALITY AND THE NDP

In 1960 Grant was invited to join with Michael Oliver, Pierre Trudeau, and
others to help chart the direction of a nezv progressive political party to replace the
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), soon to be called the New Demo-
cratic Party (NDP). Together they produced a book, Social Purpose for Can-
ada. Although he was initially drawn to the party because it challenged the
materialism and vulgarity of capitalism, his strong pacifist beliefs forced him to
break with the NDP when it voted to defeat John Diefenbaker's Conservative gov-
ernment in 1962 on the issue of whether to accept nuclear weapons for Canada.
And, while he welcomed a strong alternative to the capitalist parties, he never felt
 Equality and the NDP 59

completely comfortable with the NDP since most of its members did not accept his
view that equality had to be grounded in the equality of souls before God.

An Ethic of Community (1961)*

In the last twenty years we Canadians have achieved the biggest eco-
nomic expansion of our history. We have been able to impose our
dominion over nature so that we can satisfy more human desires than
ever before. We have moved from producing primarily raw materials to
being an industrial society of mass production and mass consumption
such as the United States. Every year a higher percentage of Canadians
lives in the new environment of the mass society. This achievement has
been due partially to special Canadian circumstances - the vigour and
initiative of our people, the rewards from new resources on the northern
frontier of this continent - but even more has it been due to the world-
wide scientific and technological revolution of the twentieth century.
The organizing genius of the American applied the scientific discoveries
of the European with great vigour to the problems of production and so
created the first mass consumption society in history. We now recognize
that this form of society will spread to all parts of the world.
What is even more fundamental about our society than its structure
of 'state capitalist' power is that it is a 'mass society.' The term 'mass
society' is inadequate shorthand for the radically new conditions under
which our highly organized technological society makes us live. These
new conditions are experienced most profoundly in the growing urban
conglomerations such as Toronto and Los Angeles, but nearly all the
people in North America now have a share of them. The farmer listens
to television and drives a car and may even organize his supply of rain;
he may not experience the mass society quite so directly as does a resi-
dent of Toronto, but he still experiences it. What makes this aspect of
modern life more fundamental than the capitalist structure of power is
that this is the condition of life towards which all human beings are
moving, whether their institutions are capitalist or not. Certain prob-
lems produced by these conditions are common to any mass society.
Indeed, even if our capitalist structure disappears in Canada we will still
live in a mass society. It seems imperative, therefore, to try to distin-

George Grant, 'An Ethic of Community,' in Social Purpose for Canada, ed. Michael Oliver
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1961), 3-26.
60 Politics and Morality

guish between those problems which are directly a product of our cap-
italist institutions and those which are indigenous to any mass society.
The term 'mass society' is used to summarize a set of conditions and
experiences so new and so different from the past that nobody can
describe them adequately or fathom accurately what is coming to be in
the world. Nevertheless, certain generalizations must be attempted.
This is a society in which high individual acquisition and consumption
of goods and services is increasingly open to most in return for compar-
atively short hours of work and in which an immense variety of com-
modities is ready to attract and to encourage a vast diversity of human
desires. It is a society which requires a high technical competence from
many to keep it operating efficiently and where therefore what is
demanded of most people is to be skilled at one small part of the whole
enterprise but not necessarily knowledgeable about the whole. It is a
society in which most people live within and under the control of mas-
sive organizations (private and governmental), the purposes and direc-
tion of which are quite external to them. The population is more and
more concentrated in the big cities, that is, in environments so com-
plex that they must remain unfathomable to the individual and in
which the individual's encounters with other persons cannot always or
even frequently be with neighbours he knows, but are rather with
strangers who are likely to appear as impersonal units to him. It is only
necessary to compare shopping in a supermarket and in a country
store, or driving to work in a small town and on a metropolitan freeway,
to see the different human relations which arise in this new life.
The result of living in such a society is that individuals experience a
new kind of freedom and independence, and also a new kind of control
and dependence. The freedom is not only that in a high-consumption
economy a multitude of new choices and experiences is open to peo-
ple, but also that in this environment the traditional standards of con-
duct become less operative. The high technical competence required
and the kind of education necessary to produce it takes men to the
point of technical reason where they see themselves as 'wised up' and as
not bound by the old ethical and religious standards. Authorities such
as the family and the church become less powerful so that individuals
are free to make their own standards. At the same time as the mass soci-
ety produces this new sense of freedom, it also produces new imper-
sonal authorities which bind the individual more than before, at the
level both of action and of opinion. In large cities the maintenance of
order in the vast tangle of conflicting egos requires a determined gov-
 Equality and the NDP 61

ernment and police force which must inevitably treat the individual
arbitrarily and as a cipher. The individual is also coerced in what he
desires and what he believes to be true by the instruments of mass com-
munication which press on him from every side, presenting forcefully
standards which suit the purposes of big organizations. Indeed, this
control of action and opinion has been intensified by the fact that the
cold war has made North America something of a garrison state.
What is central to this new experience and what distinguishes it from
living in the old small town and rural worlds is that the individual is at
one and the same time more dependent on big institutions and yet less
organically related to them. This has meant inevitably a dying away of
the individual's effective participation in politics. The institutions
which control us are so powerful and so impersonal that individuals
come to believe that there is no point in trying to influence them; one
must rather live with them as they are. The result is that more and more
people think of the state as 'they' rather than as 'we.' In great cities
where so much of existence is public, individuals find their most real
satisfaction in private life because here their freedom is operative,
while in the public sphere they know their actions to have less and less
significance. Thus, the mass society calls into question the possibility of
democratic government, founded as it was on the idea that each citizen
could and should exert his influence on the course of public affairs.
In general it can be said that the mass society gives men a sense of
their own personal freedom while destroying the old orders of life
which mediated meaning to men in simpler environments. Indeed, as
men sense their freedom to make themselves, unhampered by the old
traditions, they may find it difficult to give content and meaning to that
freedom, so that more easily than in the past their lives can reflect a sur-
render to passivity and the pursuit of pleasure as a commodity. When
men have no easily apprehendable law of life given them by tradition,
the danger is that their freedom will be governed by an arbitrary and
external law of mediocrity and violence which will debase their human-
ity rather than fulfil it. This relation between increased freedom and
the lack of well-defined meanings is the essential fact with which any
politics of the mass age must come to grips. The capitalist structure of
our institutions undoubtedly gives this problem its own peculiar tint,
but basically the same problem will be present in all societies, whatever
their economic structure, once they have reached a mature stage of
technological development.
Despite the inadequacies of present economic arrangements, a
62 Politics and Morality

greater cause for criticism of our society can be found in areas which
are not simply economic but extend over the whole range of human
well-being. In these areas it is more difficult to judge what is good and
bad in our society and thus more difficult for socialists to state clearly
and realistically how their goals differ from those now served. This can
be seen as soon as one compares the goals of socialism in a society of
scarcity with its goals in a society of affluence. On what grounds does a
socialist party ask people to vote for it under high-consumption condi-
tions? It is clear, for example, that if there were a major economic catas-
trophe in North America the power of a socialist party would be vasdy
increased. But no sane person desires such a catastrophe. Nor does it
seem likely. What seems likely is that technology will continue to bring
us growing prosperity and that our present institutions, though not
dividing that prosperity fairly, will do a sufficiently adequate job of
management to prevent any widespread or bitter discontent. In such a
society there may not be the goads of hunger to provoke dissent. This
being so, by what criteria of human well-being would the socialist criti-
cize such a society?
It becomes more and more important for socialists to have a pro-
found view of human good as society's most pressing problems become
less simply quantitative and begin to involve qualitative distinctions. If a
child is undernourished, if a family is living in one room, if a man has to
do hard or boring physical work for twelve hours a day, it is easy to see
what is needed for greater well-being: more food, more room, shorter
hours. There is still a multitude of such direct quantitative problems in
Canada and the old socialist ethic of egalitarian material prosperity is
the principle under which they can be solved. Nevertheless, it is clear
that as we move to greater technological mastery (a movement that can
only be stopped by war) the most pressing social questions will call
forth judgments as to which activities realize our full humanity and
which inhibit it. What can be done to make our cities communities in
which the human spirit can flourish? How far can we go in seeing that
in all work, particularly in large factories, construction jobs, and offices,
the dull or even degrading element is cut to a minimum and the cre-
ative responsible part brought to a maximum? How far can we make
the association of experts and power elites sufficiently open for large
numbers of people to take part in those decisions which shape their
lives? How can we stimulate education (in its broadest sense) so that
the new leisure will be more than a new boredom of passive acquies-
cence in pleasures arranged by others? How can we see that in right-
 Equality and the NDP 63

fully cultivating the fullest equality we do not produce a society of

mediocrity and sameness rather than of quality and individuality? How
can we produce an order and self-discipline in society which restrains
the selfish and the greedy without becoming so authoritarian that indi-
vidual initiative is crushed? How can we cultivate freedom for the indi-
vidual without having it become identified (as it is now) with ruthless
self-interest and the grasping of more than a fair share?
Any set of institutions is finally held together by a general conception
of well-being which pervades them all. For example, in the last twenty
years the chief Canadian ideal of manhood has become the ambitious
young executive, aggressive in his own interests, yet loyal to his corpo-
ration, with a smart wife and two happy children. (He is sexually
adjusted yet respectable, and never puts sex above the interest of the
corporation.) He looks forward to a continually rising income and con-
tinually rising power and prestige. He will drive increasingly expensive
cars and live in an increasingly expensive neighbourhood. He plays a
part in respectable community activities (such as charities and art gal-
leries) , but sees that this does not interfere with the interests of his cor-
poration or himself and keeps it clear that what really matters in life is
business and ambition. He tries to make his opinions on all matters
conform to what is considered 'sound' in the higher echelons of his
corporation and knows he can only take part in politics or other activi-
ties insofar as his superiors approve. That such a young man should be
increasingly the ideal of our society is inevitable: this ideal best serves
our corporations and they do everything in their power to encourage
and even create it. The advertisements of conspicuous consumption
are addressed to these young aspirants and their idealized image comes
back to us from the advertisements.
Such concepts of well-being (let the cynical call them mythology) are
the visions in response to which the individual models and fashions
himself. In developing such an ideal capitalism has not been without
sense. The people who take up this ideal are full of the energetic spirit
which assists certain forms of economic growth. Yet at what price in
human well-being has this image and reality been created? For it is an
ideal which can be achieved by very few. As a wise man has written
about Canada: 'It needs only a simple exercise in arithmetic to show
that at any given moment, all but a very small minority, even of
employed adult men, have passed the age when they can expect any
kind of promotion. Business ambition is available as motivation only for
the few, even in Canada.'1
64 Politics and Morality

The result of this is the frustration of many who attempt to pursue

the ideal; but beyond this is the sad fact that its pervasiveness prevents
any widespread expression of other ideals of human conduct which are
more universally fulfilling. It thus persuades too much of our best tal-
ent to direct itself along one route. The immense rewards it offers (plus
its public identification with true success) have led too large a percent-
age of our energetic young people into this one activity at the expense
of other socially necessary and desirable activities, for example, school-
teaching, public service, pure science, social work, the ministry, and the
arts. When we recognize how much better comparatively the Russians
are doing in elementary education than ourselves, we must face the fact
that the Russian communal idea encourages respect for school teaching
in a way that our capitalist ethic cannot.
Since reward in money and power are directed by state capitalism to
those concerned with goods which can be produced privately at a
profit, other activities tend to become pale shadows of business. The
word 'business' is now tacked on to all our professions and pursuits:
'the medical business,' 'the legal business,' 'the entertainment busi-
ness,' 'the education business,' the newspaper business.' ('The religion
business' is more advanced in the United States than it is as yet in Can-
ada.) Health, entertainment, information, order, beauty and truth are
all commodities which individuals purvey at a profit and can only be
socially justified if they can be 'sold' at a profit. The economic self-seek-
ing of the individual is the only instrument available for the production
of excellence. Yet this must frustrate excellence arising in many fields
where the profit motive is not sufficient for achievement. These fields,
where capitalist incentives fail, are the very ones where we most need
success in the age of affluence.
Questioning of this capitalist ideal may be raised at an even higher
level of morality. The type of young executive described can easily pass
over from healthy competitive energy to ruthlessness in his own inter-
ests within his corporation, and ruthlessness in the relations of his cor-
poration to the rest of society. Indeed, the ideal tends to encourage
ruthlessness as the very mark of the manly. But such ruthlessness is the
mainspring of that division of person from person which is the cause of
all social disruption. It is the very denial of our membership one with
another: a more insidious type of sin than the personal weaknesses we
often exclusively identify with that word. A society is not likely to be a
place of healthy loyalties and ordered cohesion if its members are
taught to pursue first and foremost their economic self-interest and if
 Equality and the NDP 65

its leaders are chosen from those who pursue that self-interest more
ruthlessly.
Indeed, the most dangerous result of state capitalism is that our soci-
ety recruits its chief leadership from the executives who have been most
successful in living out the capitalist ideal. As later essays will show in
more detail, the top executives of the corporations will not only control
our economic life, but also decisively control other institutions of our
society - our political parties, our universities, our churches, our chari-
ties. For example, the leaders of the great corporations are an over-
whelming majority of the members of the governing boards of our
universities. The higher education which they control must therefore
be in the last analysis the kind which their vision of life dictates. Is it
likely that men trained to manage corporations whose chief end is max-
imum profit will be people of wide social vision? Can it be hoped that
they will fully understand the subtle problems that the mass society of
high consumption now faces? Yet at every point where these new prob-
lems are arising the structure of our capitalism gives men with this lim-
ited view the deciding power in dealing with them. It produces a
leadership impotent to take the obvious next step forward in our soci-
ety. And this question of leadership applies not only to domestic issues,
but to the relation of our society to the rest of the world. In 1945 the
business elite in North America had in their hands the unquestioned
leadership of the world. Because of their restricted vision that leader-
ship is now passing more and more away from North America and
more and more into the hands of a tough communist elite. With all its
initial advantages the capitalist leadership could not compete against
the also limited communist ideal, because it could only put up against
it the motives of corporate and personal greed and the impulses for
personal publicity and prestige hunting. It is, of course, not only the
business community in North America which will pay for this failure of
leadership, but all free men who care about the traditions of the West.
Our state capitalism is indeed more than a practical system for pro-
ducing and distributing goods; it is also a system of ideas and ideals
which determines the character of leadership and inculcates a domi-
nating ethic in our democracy. When socialists criticize it, therefore,
they must recognize that they are concerned not only with alternative
governmental techniques in economic affairs but with profound ques-
tions of what constitutes right and wrong for persons and for society.
They are maintaining that not only capitalist arrangements but the very
capitalist ethic is quite unable to come to grips with the problems of the
66 Politics arid Morality

mass technological world. Therefore, when socialists pass beyond criti-

cism to their proposals for the future, these proposals must be put for-
ward riot only as a set of specific economic and political techniques but
as a higher conception of well-being - that is, as a morality. They must
also be able to show that the social morality they propound comes to
grips more cogently with our problems than does the present capitalist
ethic. Socialist doctrine must be a morality and it must be a higher and
more realistic morality than that which it is to replace.
Given the power of entrenched self-interest in individuals and insti-
tutions and the tendency to passive mediocrity among great numbers
of persons, nobody can really believe that a just and creative society is
emerging inevitably as our technological affluence increases. Neither
can anyone believe that a new dawn will break after a great economic
catastrophe, let alone after the absurdity of a violent revolution. Such
ideas are the dreams of an innocent past. If we are to reach a better way
of dealing with the problems of a mass society, this will only come about
by the free choice of a multitude of Canadians who are highly con-
scious of true human good and determined on its wide social realiza-
tion. In such a situation revitalized socialist theory is a necessary basis
for effective socialist action. Only in terms of a consistent political and
social morality will socialists be able to persuade Canadians that there is
a better alternative to our present capitalist system and ethic. Such a
morality can only be based on a profound vision of human well-being.
A moral view of socialism is contrary to a belief held by certain politi-
cians and political theorists in Canada: that the art of politics is just the
balancing and refereeing of the interests of various pressure groups.
This is the Mackenzie King theory of politics and it has been taken
over by his disciples who may be found in both the Liberal and Conser-
vative parties. In such a view of politics there is no need to appeal to
ultimate criteria of human good. A socialist edition of this doctrine is
that the job of a socialist party consists in marshalling together the
short-term self-interest of those opposed to capitalism and through the
power of that marshalling to realize those self-interests. Such a doctrine
is supposed to be 'realistic' socialism. It is, however, not an alternative
open to true socialists although it may be open to the slick and success-
ful who were once Liberals and are now more likely to be Conserva-

William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1949), leader of the Liberal Party, 1919-48, and
prime minister of Canada, 1921-6, 1926-30, 1935-48, had become a symbol to opposi-
tion parties of unprincipled shifts of political position for partisan advantage.
 Equality and the NDP 67

lives. The political technicians of the old parties are in a position to say
that they are simply 'honest brokers' and therefore need not think
about issues of ultimate human good; actually their aim, of course, is to
stay in power and work things out within the limits of the present capi-
talist structure. Indeed, they seriously delude themselves in thinking
they are balancing in the name of democracy. What they are really
doing is becoming servants of an ever more powerful corporate capital-
ism and what they call balancing is doling out minor concessions so
that interests other than the capitalist will not make too great a fuss.
Socialists have now the alternative of this amoral theory of politics
because what they are interested in is not simply power within the
present system, but the art of using power to make men free. They can-
not play the role of flatterers to a disappearing democracy, because
they are the friends of a true and continuing democracy. A policy of
drift in matters of theory about ultimate human good (which is the
upshot of moral cynicism) has nothing to offer socialists because it sim-
ply serves to perpetuate the status quo.
The cement which binds together the ethical system of socialism is
the belief in equality. It is the principle which tells us whom we are talk-
ing about when we speak of human well-being. We are not speaking of
some rather than others, or of some more than others - but of each
person. This assumption of equality may seem so commonplace in Can-
ada that it hardly needs discussing as a principle. Is not equality an
assumed article of faith for all true Canadians? Every political orator
must speak of it; even our capitalism must justify itself by calling itself
'people's capitalism.' At a deeper level, is not the central achievement
of modern political theory the enunciation of the principle of equality,
as against the principle of hierarchy which was central to the classical
world? The chief driving force behind the social reforms of the last two
hundred years has been this principle. Is not, then, a discussion of
equality the simple rehashing of a platitude which every decent man
accepts and to which the indecent have to pay lip service?
Yet is this so? As we move into the mass world, how much is the belief
in equality sustained in our thought or practice? It is indubitable that
theoretical criticisms of equality are increasingly prevalent. Is not
equality the enemy of liberty? Will not the striving for equality produce
a dead-level society? Is not the search for equality something we should
eschew economically, as making us unproductive by holding back the
energetic, the responsible, and the intelligent? Has it not produced
mediocrity in our education? Wealthy men with no knowledge of moral
68 Politics and Morality

or political philosophy will bring out as a triumphant discovery (what

one might have considered an obvious fact) that men are not equal in
talent, and rush on to deduce from this that equality is a ridiculous doc-
trine. Nor is such ridicule met with only in expected quarters. In his
attempt to drive the Russians to work, Stalin maintained that equality
was a petty bourgeois ideal.
More influential than these theoretical criticisms is the fact that
equality is becoming more at variance with social reality. The tendency
to stratification and non-participation which threatens equality is more
than a product of capitalism, but is related to industrialism itself, as can
be seen from the fact that a new class system is appearing in the Soviet
Union as much as in North America. The very structure of mass society
produces impersonal hierarchies of power in which equality can have
no substance, particularly equality of participation in economic and
political life. This tendency in any industrial society produces added
difficulties with our capitalism in which vast accumulations of eco-
nomic power in private hands and inequalities of possession are the
very substance of the system. In such a situation double-think about
equality becomes manifest. The popular leaders of governments orate
about the glories of equality on the hustings while enacting economic
policies which establish intractable inequalities as the very essence of
our social life. In such circumstances, talk about equality becomes
more and more ritual emptied of belief— part of the equipment of the
'engineer of consent.'
It must also be recognized, of course, that the principle of equality
has been interpreted in a particular way within North American his-
tory. In our past, it meant a combination of political equality (with all
its rich content of the ballot, equality before the law, and so on) with
equality of opportunity for economic advancement. It was believed that
political equality would safeguard equality of opportunity in economic
and social life from attacks by sinister interests. This combination of
political equality and open careers for the talented would prevent the
unfair 'conventional' inequalities, while leaving the 'natural' inequali-
ties to work themselves out. In the early days when our country was a
frontier individualistic capitalism, this edition of the equality principles
worked pretty well. The question is now, however, whether such a the-
ory of equality is adequate for the conditions of the stratified mass soci-
ety. Can formal political equality still safeguard equality of opportunity
from the attacks of vested interests? Does not equality of opportunity
become more and more to mean the necessity of the ambitious to serve
 Equality and the NDP 69

the corporations? In a world where the very complexity of our society

makes us increasingly dependent on one another, do we not have to
move forward to a richer conception of economic equality than equal-
ity of opportunity? Is this not particularly pressing for our democracy,
in which the problem of leisure is as urgent as the problem of work?
In such circumstances it is no longer possible to take equality as a
platitudinous article of faith which all may be assumed to assume. To
those who would attack the principle, openly or covertly, we must try to
express why exactly we believe in it. We must elucidate how it is related
to other necessary principles such as the recognition of the diversity of
talent. No satisfactory or systematic answer to these problems is, of
course, possible in a short essay. What follows is only intended as an
introduction to the question.2
Equality should be the central principle of society since all persons,
whatever their condition, must freely choose to live by what is right or
wrong. This act of choosing is the ultimate human act and is open to
all. In this sense all persons are equal, and differences of talent are of
petty significance. Any man who is fair in his dealings, any woman who
treats the interests of others as of the same importance as her own, may
in so doing have achieved the essential human act of loving the good as
much or more than the cleverest or most powerful person who ever
lived. Because of this fact, no human being should be treated simply as
a means, like a tree or a car, but as an end. Our moral choices matter
absolutely in the scheme of things. Any social order must then try to
constitute itself within the recognition of this basic fact of moral per-
sonality which all equally possess.
It is clear that the foregoing is an essentially religious foundation for
equality. Such a foundation will seem to the unbeliever too limited a
basis for social principle. It must be insisted, however, that the idea of
equality arose in the West within a particular set of religious and philo-
sophical ideas. I cannot see why men should go on believing in the
principle without some sharing in those ideas. The religious tradition
was the biblical, in which each individual was counted as of absolute sig-
nificance before God. This belief united with the principle of rational-
ity as found in the Stoic philosophers. Among the greatest Western
thinkers the conception of rationality has been increasingly unified
with the religious principle of respect. To state this historical fact is not
to deny that many men have believed in equality outside this religious
and philosophical tradition. The question is rather whether they have
been thinking clearly when they have so believed. This religious basis
70 Politics and Morality

for equality seems to me the only adequate one, because I cannot see
why one should embark on the immensely difficult social practice of
treating each person as important unless there is something intrinsi-
cally valuable about personality. And what is intrinsically valuable about
all persons except their freedom as moral agents? At the level of effi-
ciency it is surely more convenient to treat some persons as having no
importance, and thus to build a society of inequality in which some
people matter and some do not. If individuals are only accidental con-
glomerations of atoms, why should we respect their rights when it does
not suit our interests or inclinations to do so?
It is clear that marxism, as the dominant Western philosophy in the
East, appeals to the sense of equality. The question is not whether this
is good, but whether within marxist materialism there is any consistent
place for this belief; whether, indeed, one of the reasons why the marx-
ists in power have been so willing to sacrifice persons ruthlessly has not
been that moral personality has no place in their theory. So also in the
West ideals such as 'the survival of the fittest,' when taken over from
biology and used about society, led to an undermining of respect for
the individual. How often has one heard business people justify the
results of the market by such an appeal to Darwin? What must be
insisted upon is that in mass society the practice which sustains the
rights of persons qua persons is very difficult to preserve. It will surely
only be sustained by those who have thought clearly what it is about
human beings which makes them worthy of being treated with respect.
To state this is, of course, in no way to imply that socialists who dis-
agree as to the ultimate justification of equality cannot work together.
Religious believers from various traditions will hold that in the hard
pinches only such belief will make equality a possibility. The non-
religious who are egalitarian may feel this is only superstition and have
some other basis for their belief. But this need not prevent them work-
ing together. For, as the history of Canada manifests, common political
ends can be sought without theoretical agreement.
It may still be argued (and has been) that although we should treat
ourselves and others as of absolute worth, this does not imply equality
in the day-to-day doings of life. A man is as free to save his soul in a slum
as in a mansion, we are sometimes told, and therefore there can be no
argument from this religious account to any particular worldly condi-
tions. The truth of the first part of this statement may be admitted; the
second part, however, must be categorically denied. The justification of
equality must then make this denial. It is based on two facts about
 Equality and the NDP 71

human personality which seem to the present writer indubitable. First,

it is likely to be spiritually bad for any person to be in a position of per-
manent and inevitable inferiority in his relation with anyone else. Sec-
ondly, it is likely to be spiritually bad for a person to be in a position of
unchecked superiority in his relations with another. That is, relations
of superiority-subordination tend to thwart the true good of the people
on either side (whatever petty pleasures of sadism or masochism may
result and whatever mechanical efficiency may be obtained). Because
this thwarting tends to occur, social policy should be directed always to
the elimination of such relations. And this policy should be applied in
the factory, the office, the family, the general social and political order.
For example, families require discipline, but if that discipline is not to
degrade children and parents alike, it must be directed to its proper
end of leading the children to a freedom equal to that of their parents.
Also in a factory or office there must be a proper ordering work by
somebody in authority, but that authority must not deny the equality of
those ordered, or their creativity and responsibility for the work done.
The end which any society should be working for, however slow and dif-
ficult its accomplishment, is the elimination of these relations of supe-
riority and subordination in all aspects of life.
Nearly all in Canada will grant some degree of equality before the law
or at the ballot box, but when it comes to equality of participation in
wealth, responsibility, and culture there is a violent anti-egalitarian
reaction. Therefore, it must be insisted that a society which takes seri-
ously its first principle that all its members are to be regarded as equal
must give economic content to that regard. Men are living beings and if
society does not allow them to sustain life it cannot be said to regard
them. To have enough and to get it from reasonable hours of work is
the condition not only of a comfortable and sensuously gratifying life
(of which freedom from fatigue is not the least part) but of a life which
can partake properly in love and play, art and thought, politics and reli-
gion. At the beginning of political theory Aristotle laid down that a free
man must be a man with leisure - that is, a man who can get enough
goods without working too hard. It is obvious that mothers with auto-
matic washing machines are likely to have more energy to give to the
cultivation of their children than those who must do the washing on
boards, that a machinist who earns the same amount of money for forty
as against sixty hours has more energy to go fishing, take responsibility
in the union, or paint a picture.
It is now necessary to see how these arguments are related to the
72 Politics and Morality

main argument against equality. This is based on an appeal to the fact

of natural diversity of talent. It is said that men are unequal in talent
and that therefore to base society on equality is to base it on an illusion
which can only lead to social disaster in the form of stagnation and
mediocrity. When society follows the facts of diversity of talent it natu-
rally falls into a hierarchical structure. We so need the gifts of the tal-
ented that we must reward them greatly. It is obvious that this argument
has cogency. Men do differ widely in talents. It is also obviously true
that a wise social order will encourage certain talents for the sake of its
continuing health and that any system of rewards must include the eco-
nomic. Also, economic reward is not solely for the purpose of giving
people things. Responsible officials, brain surgeons, and artists need a
high standard of life to give them that peace necessary to their efficient
performance.
Nevertheless, this is not all the story: the principle of hierarchy which
arises from diversity of talents must be balanced against the principle of
equality which arises from the absolute worth of all men. That proper
balancing must be based on the moral distinction between the valuing
of qualities and the regarding of persons. This distinction is the follow-
ing: to be with any set of people is to be aware of valuing disparate qual-
ities of intellect and physique, responsibility and imagination. But this
does not mean that we should regard the interests of one of those per-
sons less highly than that of any of the others. That is, qualities are val-
ued, persons are regarded. To make this distinction is to put activities
on different levels of moral importance. The regard which is due to
persons is not dependent on the sum total of their qualities. We cannot
score John 90 percent in qualities and Richard 40 percent and there-
fore say the regard due to Richard is limited by his low score. To do so
is to deny the absolute regard which is due him. It is, of course, quite
possible to give up the Judaeo-Christian truth. But if one holds it, then
a hierarchy of talent and an equality of persons cannot be on the same
level as principles for the ordering of society. How else have we learnt
to scorn slavery? We scorn it because we do not find admirable a society
whose leaders, thinkers, and artists bring forth their highest qualities in
the freedom of being waited on by a slave class. We scorn it because the
encouragement of these qualities cannot be measured in the same
scale as the debasement of these other persons by slavery. The extreme
case of slavery makes clear what is true in any circumstances. The value
to be recognized in the highest artistic or scientific genius - in such
men as Mozart or Einstein - gives me no reason to regard them more
 Equality and the NDP 73

highly as persons than anybody else, or to fail to recognize that my duty

to regard persons is a duty of a higher level than my valuing of the true,
the noble, or the beautiful. For this reason, the hierarchy of talents
must always be subordinate as a social principle to the basic equality of
persons.
To say this is not to deny that there is a grave difficulty in balancing
properly the claims of equality and diversity of talent in any society. Dif-
ferences in human talent are inevitably so great that the differences in
ways of life and degrees of power must also be great. A corrupt belief in
equality which stood in the way of people knowing what it is to do some-
thing well would obviously be pernicious. Society must offer incentives
to encourage people to do things well and to do the difficult jobs well.
It is clear that some persons give to society more than they take, while
others use society simply for what they can get out of it. Social policy
must obviously encourage the givers.
Once having granted the real substance in the argument about
incentives, it must be repeated that most of the talk along that line now
heard in Canada is mainly a justification of the belief that the most
important thing in life is to make a lot of money. This becomes clear
when one asks the question: what are these incentives, and what social
structure is to produce them? There are all kinds of varying systems
to produce incentives towards differing social aims. And it must be
insisted here that most people in our society who argue against equality
in the name of incentives are arguing in the name of one particular
structure of incentives - the structure which encourages men to assist
profitable private production and distribvition of goods. Moreover, the
powerful instruments of opinion have tried to identify in the minds of
the general public the capitalist model of incentive with all possible sys-
tems of incentive. They have tried (with some success) to convince peo-
ple that only a capitalist society will maintain a proper care for incentive
and that therefore an alternative form of organization will destroy ini-
tiative and energy. This is nonsense. What our present capitalism
encourages is certain forms of activities at the expense of others.
It is often argued that by maintaining a wealthy and privileged class
certain 'finer things' are kept alive. It is not necessary to discuss this
argument in general, because it is so patently absurd to apply it to the
privileged groups which exist in Canada. What are these 'finer things'
that owe their survival to the rich, and which would not continue in a
more egalitarian society? What valuable qualities of life do the very rich
keep going in Canada with their pursuit of luxury (conspicuous or
74 Politics and Morality

inconspicuous as their taste may be), their externalized culture and

prestige seeking? Horse racing and collecting pictures are their great-
est positive achievements. Among the moderately rich what noble cul-
ture is the product of Forest Hill and Westmount which might be
threatened by greater equality? People who give their lives to the petty
round of snobbery at home and relax playing cards in Florida in iden-
tical luxury hotels and mink stoles are hardly likely to be the vanguard
of a Canadian renaissance.
Our capitalist system of incentives, then, can no longer be said to
lead to that encouragement of diversity of talents which was its original
justification. Equality of opportunity to serve General Motors or the
Argus Corporation is not what earlier democrats meant by their doc-
trine. The incentives of capitalism no longer do what they are said they
do. They no longer encourage that wide range of skillful activities
which becomes increasingly our need in a mass society. In such a situa-
tion it is as much the function of a socialist morality to work out new
and realistic schemes of incentive as it is to think out new means of sus-
taining and enlarging the equality of all persons against the threats of
the mass age.
Two last points must be emphasized about the principle of equality
in the technological society. First, it must be repeated that never before
in history has it been open for the majority to have large amounts of
goods with high degrees of leisure. This will be a growing possibility as
techniques of automation increase, as the robots do more and more of
the work in the factories and offices. Such equality to participate in lei-
sure becomes moreover a pressing necessity of our economic health.
Since 1939 a large percentage of the income of this continent has been
devoted to defence. No sane man can want that to continue indefi-
nitely. If the tension between the West and the communist world is
reduced, however gradually, somehow the immense resources that
have been put into the military effort will have to be used for peaceful
purposes. This will only be possible if the old shibboleths of inequality
are overcome. If our mastery of nature is to be used for peaceful pur-
poses, a conscious policy of equality becomes a necessity. Such a policy
within North America must, of course, be related to conditions in the
rest of the world and our responsibility for and dependence on such
conditions. How fast we should push for a realized society of leisure at
home, and how far that should be restrained to help the Asians and
Africans develop industrially, is a difficult question of balance and can-
not be discussed in detail here. However, it merely suggests caution, it
 Equality and the NDP 75

does not change the basic fact that the scientific economy of North
America can only be healthy if it is set towards a basic policy of eco-
nomic equality.
Secondly, and more important, the very form of human existence
created by the mass society makes imperative a struggle for equality of
participation in mind; imperative, that is, if we are to escape the civili-
zation of the ant-heap. If it be probable that in the future human
beings grow up in conditions where physical survival does not take
most of their time, what then will give life its meaning and purpose?
What is worth doing when the robots are doing the work in the facto-
ries? In a society of widespread leisure, aimlessness and boredom will
be much more likely than in the past when leisure was the privilege of
the few.
To meet such a situation, our democracy must consciously stimulate
the equality of participation in mind, in ways that it has never dreamed
of in the past. When leisure is open to all, then education must be open
to all. To overcome the impersonality of the mass society, new relation-
ships in work and leisure must be developed and lived out; indeed, new
relationships at every level of existence - in art, in sex, and in religion.
It would be folly, of course, to think that these new experiences will
come easily or inevitably. Human sin is a historical constant, however
much the forms of it may vary from era to era. Under any conditions it
is hard for us to make a success of living. Nevertheless, one thing is cer-
tain. North America is the first continent called to bring human excel-
lence to birth throughout the whole range of the technological society.
At the moment, the survival of its capitalist ethic, more than anything
else, stands in the way of realizing that opportunity. The only basis on
which it could be realized is a clearly defined ethic of community which
understands the dignity of every person and is determined on ways of
fulfilling that dignity in our new conditions.

NOTES

1 Sir Geoffrey Vickers, 'The Unstable Society,' University of Toronto Quarterly,

vol. 23, no. 4 (July 1959): 315-51.
2 Our present social and political theory is in grave need of a systematic dis-
cussion of equality. It is lacking, however, because the political philosophers
and scientists sadly mirror the impersonality of our age by concentrating
their energies on technical matters and on serving the society as it is.
76 Politics and Morality

CANADA AND NATIONALISM

Lament for a Nation was the book that made George Grant famous and imme-
diately established him as one of Canada's leading political thinkers. It is still the
work for which he is best known. In ninety-seven pages he wove together themes of
politics, history, philosophy, and religion. He was driven, he later said, by sheer
anger that Lester Pearson's Liberals had brought down Diefenbaker's govern-
ment so that they could yield to American pressure and bring nuclear arms into
Canada. Although Grant foretold the demise of Canadian independence,
Lament inspired a generation of Canadians of all political beliefs to make one
last nationalist effort to save their country.

I have written a piece called A Lament for a Nation of about 25,000 words. It is,
therefore, too long to publish in a quarterly. I write to know whether there is
any monographic publication in Canada for pieces this length. It would be
better to publish it in Canada than the United States as it is entirely about
Canadian life.
Its content may be such as to exclude it from your press, because it is the
Canadian established classes (particularly the Liberal party) who are consid-
ered most responsible in what I consider Canada's demise. Diefenbaker is
criticized, but not from within liberal assumptions. Neither will it be favourably
received by any socialist as it does not presume the world is getting better and
better. It may be, therefore, that it is just too direct a publication for your
press, but I write to ask.
- George Grant to Frances Halpenny, 25 February 1964

Lament for a Nation 1965^

Never has such a torrent of abuse been poured on any Canadian figure
as that during the years from 1960 to 1965. Never have the wealthy and
the clever been so united as they were in the joint attack on Mr John
Diefenbaker. It has made life pleasant for the literate classes to know

John George Diefenbaker (1895-1979), leader of the Conservative Party, 1957-67, and
prime minister of Canada, 1957-63. His government was defeated in 1963 on a parlia-
mentary motion criticizing his defence policy, especially his refusal to accept nuclear
weapons for Canada's armed forces.
George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClel-
land and Stewart 1965). Used with permission.
 Canada and Nationalism 77

that they were on the winning side. Emancipated journalists were

encouraged to express their dislike of the small-town Protestant politi-
cian, and they knew they would be well paid by the powerful for their
efforts. Suburban matrons and professors knew that there was an open
season on Diefenbaker, and that jokes against him at cocktail parties
would guarantee the medal of sophistication ...
The tide of abuse abated after the election of 1963. The establish-
ment thought that it had broken Diefenbaker and could now afford to
patronize him. But Diefenbaker has refused to play dead. He has shown
himself capable of something the wealthy and the clever rarely under-
stand - the virtue of courage. The patronizing airs are turning once
more into abuse; the editorials and the 'news' become increasingly
vindictive.
It is interesting to speculate why Diefenbaker raised the concen-
trated wrath of the established classes. Most of his critics claim that he
is dominated by ambition, almost to the point of egomania. They also
claimed (while he was still in office) that he was dangerous because he
was an astute politician who put personal power first. Yet his actions
turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood. Astute politi-
cians, who are only interested in political power, simply do not act this
way. There must be something false or something missing in this
description of his actions. To search for a consistent description is
partly why I have written this book.
The search must be related to the title of this meditation. To lament
is to cry out at the death or at the dying of something loved. This
lament mourns the end of Canada as a sovereign state. Political laments
are not usual in the age of progress, because most people think that
society always moves forward to better things. Lamentation is not an
indulgence in despair or cynicism. In a lament for a child's death, there
is not only pain and regret, but also celebration of passed good.

I cannot but remember such things were

That were most precious to me.

In Mozart's great threnody, the Countess sings of la memoria di quel

bene. One cannot argue the meaninglessness of the world from the
facts of evil, because what could evil deprive us of, if we had not some
prior knowledge of good? The situation of absolute despair does not

The recollection of that good.

78 Politics and Morality

allow a man to write. In the theatre of the absurd, dramatists like

lonesco and Beckett do not escape this dilemma. They pretend to abso-
lute despair and yet pour out novels and plays. When a man truly
despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide. At the other extreme,
there are the saints who know that the destruction of good serves the
supernatural end; therefore they cannot lament. Those who write
laments may have heard the propositions of the saints, but they do not
know that they are true. A lament arises from a condition that is com-
mon to the majority of men, for we are situated between despair and
absolute certainty.

This meditation is limited to lamenting. It makes no practical pro-

posals for our survival as a nation. It argues that Canada's disappear-
ance was a matter of necessity. But how can one lament necessity - or,
if you will, fate? The noblest of men love it; the ordinary accept it; the
narcissists rail against it. But I lament it as a celebration of memory; in
this case, the memory of that tenuous hope that was the principle of my
ancestors. The insignificance of that hope in the endless ebb and flow
of nature does not prevent us from mourning. At least we can say with
Richard Hooker : 'Posterity may know we have not loosely through
silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.'

The confused strivings of politicians, businessmen, and civil servants

cannot alone account for Canada's collapse. This stems from the very
character of the modern era. The aspirations of progress have made
Canada redundant. The universal and homogeneous state is the pinna-
cle of political striving. 'Universal' implies a world-wide state, which
would eliminate the curse of war among nations; 'homogeneous'
means that all men would be equal, and war among classes would be
eliminated. The masses and the philosophers have both agreed that
this universal and egalitarian society is the goal of historical striving. It
gives content to the rhetoric of both communists and capitalists. This
state will be achieved by means of modern science - a science that leads

Richard Hooker (1554P-1600), British political theorist, author of the Laws of Ecclesiasti-
cal Polity.
 Canada and Nationalism 79

to the conquest of nature. Today scientists master not only non-human

nature, but human nature itself. Particularly in America, scientists con-
cern themselves with the control of heredity, the human mind, and
society. Their victories in biochemistry and psychology will give the pol-
iticians a prodigious power to universalize and homogenize. Since
1945, the world-wide and uniform society is no longer a distant dream
but a close possibility. Man will conquer man and perfect himself.
Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic. Where
modern science has achieved its mastery, there is no place for local cul-
tures. It has often been argued that geography and language caused
Canada's defeat. But behind these there is a necessity that is incompa-
rably more powerful. Our culture floundered on the aspirations of the
age of progress. The argument that Canada, a local culture, must disap-
pear can, therefore, be stated in three steps. First, men everywhere
move ineluctably toward membership in the universal and homoge-
neous state. Second, Canadians live next to a society that is the heart of
modernity. Third, nearly all Canadians think that modernity is good, so
nothing essential distinguishes Canadians from Americans.

The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of

Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build
a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share
with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history
was against us.
A society only articulates itself as a nation through some common
intention among its people. The constitutional arrangements of 1791,
and the wider arrangements of the next century, were only possible
because of a widespread determination not to become part of the great
Republic. Among both the French and British, this negative intention
sprang from widely divergent traditions. What both peoples had in
common was the fact they both recognized, that they could only be pre-
served outside the United States of America ...
Since 1945, the collapse of British power and moral force has been
evident to nearly all the world. Its present position is the end-process of
that terrible fate that has overtaken Western civilization in the last cen-
tury. When the British ruling class rushed headlong into the holocaust
of 1914, they showed their total lack of political wisdom. As much as
anybody, they had been corrupted by the modern mania. Whatever the
80 Politics and Morality

courage of Churchill in 1940, it must be remembered that he was one

of those in the Liberal Cabinet of 1914 who pushed their nation into
the intemperance of the earlier disaster. The best British and Canadian
youth had their guts torn out in the charnel house of the First World
War. To write of the collapse of Western Europe is not my purpose
here, but one small result was to destroy Great Britain as an alternative
pull in Canadian life.
The history of conservatism in Great Britain has been one of growing
emptiness and ambiguity. A political philosophy that is centred on vir-
tue must be a shadowy voice in a technological civilization. When men
are committed to technology, they are also committed to continual
change in institutions and customs. Freedom must be the first political
principle - the freedom to change any order that stands in the way of
technological advance ... As Plato saw with unflinching clarity, an impe-
rialistic power cannot have a conservative society as its home base ...

Perhaps we should rejoice in the disappearance of Canada. We leave

the narrow provincialism and our backwoods culture; we enter the
excitement of the United States where all the great things are being
done. Who would compare the science, the art, the politics, the enter-
tainment of our petty world to the overflowing achievements of New
York, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco? ...
Before discussing this position, I must dissociate myself from a com-
mon philosophic assumption. I do not identify necessity and goodness.
This identification is widely assumed during an age of progress. Those
who worship 'evolution' or 'history' consider that what must come in
the future will be 'higher,' 'more developed,' 'better,' 'freer,' than
what has been in the past. This identification is also common among
those who worship God according to Moses or the Gospels. They iden-
tify necessity and good within the rubric of providence. From the
assumption that God's purposes are unfolded in historical events, one
may be led to view history as an ever-fuller manifestation of good. Since
the tenth century of the Christian era, some Western theologians have
tended to interpret the fallen sparrow as if particular events could be
apprehended by faith as good. This doctrine of providence was given its
best philosophical expression by Hegel: 'Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltge-
richt' - 'World history is the world's judgement.' Here the doctrines of
progress and providence have been brought together. But if history is
 Canada and Nationalism 81

the final court of appeal, force is the final argument. Is it possible to

look at history and deny that within its dimensions force is the supreme
ruler? To take a progressive view of providence is to come close to wor-
shiping force. Does this not make us cavalier about evil? The screams of
the tortured child can be justified by the achievements of history. How
pleasant for the achievers, but how meaningless for the child.
As a believer, I must then reject these Western interpretations of
providence. Belief is blasphemy if it rests on any easy identification
of necessity and good. It is plain that there must be other interpreta-
tions of this doctrine. However massive the disaster we might face -
for example, the disappearance of constitutional government for sev-
eral centuries, or the disappearance of our species - belief in provi-
dence should be unaffected. It must be possible within the doctrine
of providence to distinguish between the necessity of certain happen-
ings and their goodness. A discussion of the goodness of Canada's
disappearance must therefore be separated from a discussion of its
necessity.

It has already been argued that, because of our modern assumptions

about human good, Canada's disappearance is necessary. In deciding
whether continentalism is good, one is making a judgment about pro-
gressive political philosophy and its interpretation of history. Those
who dislike continentalism are in some sense rejecting that progressive
interpretation. It can only be with an enormous sense of hesitation
that one dares to question modern political philosophy. If its assump-
tions are false, the age of progress has been a tragic aberration in the
history of the species ...
To many modern men, the assumptions of this age appear inevita-
ble, as being the expression of the highest wisdom that the race has
distilled. The assumptions appear so inevitable that to entertain the
possibility of their falsity may seem the work of a madman. Yet these
assumptions were made by particular men in particular settings.
Machiavelli and Hobbes, Spinoza and Vico, Rousseau and Hegel, Marx
and Darwin, originated this account of human nature and destiny.
Their view of social excellence was reached in conscious opposition to
that of the ancient philosophers. The modern account of human
nature and destiny was developed from a profound criticism of what
Plato and Aristotle had written. The modern thinkers believed that
82 Politics and Morality

they had overcome the inadequacies of ancient thought, while main-

taining what was true in the ancients.
Yet Plato and Aristotle would not have admitted that their teachings
could be used in this way. They believed that their own teaching was
the complete teaching for all men everywhere, or else they were not
philosophers. They believed that they had considered all the possibili-
ties open to man and had reached the true doctrine concerning
human excellence. Only the thinkers of the age of progress consid-
ered the classical writers as a preparation for the perfected thought of
their own age. The classical philosophers did not so consider them-
selves. To see the classics as a preparation for later thought is to think
within the assumptions of the age of progress. But this is to beg the
question, when the issue at stake is whether these assumptions are
true. It is this very issue that is raised by the tragedies and ambiguities
of our day.1
Ancient philosophy gives alternative answers to modern man con-
cerning the questions of human nature and destiny. It touches all the
central questions that man has asked about himself and the world. The
classical philosophers asserted that a universal and homogeneous state
would be a tyranny. To elucidate their argument would require an
account of their total teaching concerning human beings. It would take
one beyond political philosophy into the metaphysical assertion that
changes in the world take place within an eternal order that is not
affected by them. This implies a definition of human freedom quite dif-
ferent from the modern view that freedom is man's essence. It implies
a science different from that which aims at the conquest of nature.
The discussion of issues such as these is impossible in a short writing
about Canada. Also, the discussion would be inconclusive, because I
do not know the truth about these ultimate matters. Therefore, the
question as to whether it is good that Canada should disappear must
be left unsettled. If the best social order is the universal and homoge-
neous state, then the disappearance of Canada can be understood as a
step toward that order. If the universal and homogeneous state would
be a tyranny, then the disappearance of even this indigenous culture
can be seen as the removal of a minor barrier on the road to that tyr-
anny. As the central issue is left undecided, the propriety of lamenting
must also be left unsettled.
My lament is not based on philosophy but on tradition. If one cannot
be sure about the answer to the most important questions, then tradi-
tion is the best basis for the practical life. Those who loved the older tra-
 The Vietnam War 83

ditions of Canada may be allowed to lament what has been lost, even
though they do not know whether or not that loss will lead to some
greater political good. But lamentation falls easily into the vice of self-
pity. To live with courage is a virtue, whatever one may think of the
dominant assumptions of one's age. Multitudes of human beings
through the course of history have had to live when their only political
allegiance was irretrievably lost. What was lost was often something far
nobler than what Canadians have lost. Beyond courage, it is also possi-
ble to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world,
even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within
an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the
difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has been told that process is
not all. ' Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.'^

NOTES

1 The previous paragraph is dependent on the writings of Professor Leo

Strauss, who teaches at the University of Chicago. For Strauss's account of
political philosophy, see, for example, What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe,
111.: The Free Press 1959) and The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally
1964). I only hope that nothing in the foregoing misinterprets the teaching
of that wise man.
2 Virgil, Aeneid (Book VI): 'They were holding their arms outstretched in love
toward the further shore.'

THE VIETNAM WAR

Grant was a pacifist during the early stages of the Second World War and he
returned to his pacifism in the 1950s. As American involvement in Vietnam
escalated, so did Grant's outrage and he soon found, himself in active alliance
with fellow academics and students of the New Left. The speech he gave to a
'teach-in' at Varsity Arena at the University of Toronto in 1965 was his most
powerful and effective public presentation. However, it soon became clear that the
students in the New Left disagreed with Grant about tactics. Grant did not
accept the need for civil disobedience in a parliamentary regime that was still
open to reasoned opposition.
84 Politics and Morality

In the November issue, in which you published a speech of mine, you also said,
'In effect, he (G.P. Grant) seems to be suggesting that real change will only
come about within the power structures of society, not over against them.' It
amuses me how such a deduction could be drawn from my words. I certainly
think that real change is going to take place within the power structures, but it
is going to be changed for the worse. I was not saying to the protesting young
that they should not fight the present power structures. To imply that the
present power structures will change for the good is to misjudge completely
their present activity in Vietnam. What seems to be implied in your editorial is
that change for the good (e.g. progress) must happen. This proposition I
would entirely deny.
- George Grant to the editor, Christian Outlook, 29 December 1965

I enclose a draft letter which has been jointly worked out by some students
(members of the Student Union for Peace Action) and myself. It will be the
basis for a presentation to all members of parliament in the week starting Mon-
day, February 28. We are going to have a silent vigil of 48 hours at the beginning
of that week in front of parliament for its presentation. This letter is asking you
whether you would sign this document^ (or something very close to it) and
indeed whether you would take part in that silent vigil. I am going to do both.
The reasons for doing this seem to me something like the following:
(1) For whatever motives, it seems to me that the U.S.A. has got into a position
where it is massacring masses of Vietnamese. Canada is more and more impli-
cated in this, and the thought of us being implicated in a long and growing war
between Asia and North America is too terrible to contemplate. (2) I think it is
important that those of us of the older generation who are Canadian national-
ists should join these young people and show them that there are some older
people in this country who are willing to speak about this matter - and not sim-
ply the older radicals.
- George Grant to Kenneth McNaught, 11 February 1966

A Critique of the New Left (1966)+

I speak as a Canadian nationalist and as a conservative. It is necessary to

George Grant, 'Realism in Political Protest,' Christian Outlook, vol. 21, no.2 (November
1965): 3-6.
A pamphlet.
George Grant, 'A Critique of the New Left,' in Canada and Radical Social Change (Mont-
real: Black Rose 1966).
 The Vietnam War 85

start here for the following reason. To speak of the moral responsibility
of the citizen in general is impossible; the question entirely depends on
the kind of regime in which one is a citizen. The United States is a
world empire - the largest to date. Its life at home is controlled by
mammoth corporations, private and public, and through these bureau-
cracies it reaches out to control a large proportion of the globe and
soon beyond the globe. The nineteenth-century idea of the democratic
citizen making the society he inhabits by the vote and the support of
political parties must have less and less meaning. In local matters, the
citizen of an empire can achieve some minor goals. But he cannot
shape the larger institutions or move the centres of power. Democratic
citizenship is not a notion compatible with technological empires. Now
Canada moves more and more to being a satellite of that empire. And
Canadians live much of their lives under the same imperial bureaucra-
cies. The institutions of Toronto are much the same as those of Detroit.
Yet despite this there is a sense in which we still have more citizenship
here than in the U.S.A. because we have some political sovereignty, if
we fight for it. Traditional democratic means - the vote and support for
political parties - have more meaning in our smaller sphere. Political
choice is both more real and more possible in Canada. This might be
truly useful to the world, if we in Canada could use it to see that North
American relations with Asia did not always simply follow Washington.
But to pass to the broader question of what it is to be a citizen in
North America in this era, let me start from the position of the New
Left in North America, that is, the movement which has public signifi-
cance because of what it did in the civil rights struggle. I find myself in
agreement with the account the leaders of this movement give of the
inhumanity of the institutions of North America. When I read Profes-
sor Lynd in Liberation speaking of what the institutions of his society do
to human personality both at home and abroad, I agree with his
account of those institutions. When I hear what Mr Savio in Berkeley or
Mr Drushka' in Toronto write about the inhumanity of our multiversi-
ties, by and large I agree with them. How can a conservative not feel
sympathy with their outrage against the emptiness and dehumaniza-
tion that this society produces?
But when the New Left speaks of overcoming these conditions by

Staughton Lynd, an American anti-war activist who spoke at the 'teach-in' at Varsity
Arena in 1965.
New Left students and anti-war activists.
86 Politics and Morality

protest, I think they are indulging in dreams and dangerous dreams.

The moral fervour that accompanies such dreams is too valuable to be
wasted on anything but reality. When they speak as if it were possible by
marching and sitting to turn North American society away from being
an empire protecting its interest in the world by violence, I just do not
know how they can think this. When some of them speak as if the
empires of the East were not moving in the same social direction as the
United States, I think they are deluding themselves. When they pro-
pose that our modern universities can be overcome and turned into
human sources of enlightenment, I think they have not looked at our
society closely enough.
Their politics of hope and of Utopia - indeed with some of them
another outbreak of the traditional form of the politics of the apoca-
lypse - seems to me a kind of dream from which analysis should awaken
them. They seem to think that these massive institutions which stifle
human excellence can be overcome, and I think this arises from a pro-
found misinterpretation of modern history. For several centuries the
chief energies of Western society have been directed to the mastery of
nature - at first non-human nature and now human nature. We now
live in the era where that process moves quickly to its apotheosis. The
motive of this pursuit was that by it men should be made free. Freedom
was its rallying cry. And it is in the pursuit of this dream of freedom that
we have built the mammoth institutions, international and national, in
which we live. This pursuit of the mastery of nature has gained men
great victories over natural necessity. Who can doubt that? But at the
same time as it has produced these victories, it has subjected men to the
forces of the artificial necessities of the technological society. 'The fur-
ther the technical mechanism develops which allows us to escape
natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical
necessities. The artificial necessity of technique is not less harsh and
implacable for being much less obviously menacing than natural neces-
sity.'1 This is the crucial question about citizenship in this era: what is it
to be a citizen in this new society ruled by its technical apparatus?
What I do not see is why anybody should believe that by some dialec-
tical process of history there should suddenly spring out of this techno-
logical society a free and humane society. First, Western men and now
men everywhere in the world are driving with enormous speed to the
building of this technological straitjacket. This is a society which by its
very mammoth nature must destroy the idea of the responsible citizen.
What evidence is there for believing that this system can by protest be
 The Vietnam War 87

turned towards the ends of human excellence? What reason have we

for believing that the vast imperial structures will act towards each
other and towards their neighbours in a nobler way than empires have
in the past? The empires may restrain themselves from fright, but the
small nations who are unfortunate enough to be caught between them
will be ground between the millstones. And to speak about the institu-
tions I know best - the universities - what reason is there to believe that
they can be diverted from the very purpose for which they exist? The
modern universities exist above all to provide personnel to feed the vast
technological apparatus. That technological apparatus is now autono-
mous and produces its own needs which are quite detached from
human needs. Are such institutions which are of the very fabric of the
modern quest to be diverted from this end?
The supreme example of the autonomy of technique is surely the
space programme. If it is possible for man to do something it must be
done. Vast resources of brains, money, materials are poured out in the
U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. to keep this fantastic programme proliferating.
And it is accepted by the masses in both societies not only as necessary
but as man's crowning glory. One leader of the US space programme
said that as we cannot change the environment of space, we will have to
change man. So we are going to produce beings half flesh - half elec-
tronic organs. If it can be done, it must be done and it surely will be
done. This is what I mean by the autonomy of technique. The question
whether technique serves human good is no longer asked. It has
become an end in itself.
There is a lot of talk among the New Left about the present system of
society collapsing because of its internal contradictions. What signs are
there of that collapse? The American system with its extension into
Western Europe seems to me supremely confident and to have the
overwhelming majority of its citizens behind it- the same seems true of
the Russian system and will be increasingly true of the Chinese system.
One immediate reason why I think the New Left is deluded about
what is happening in North America is because it has misinterpreted
the events which took place in the southern United States. It says today:
look at our triumphs in the South; we will now carry these triumphs of
citizen action into new fields of social revolution. What has been forgot-
ten is that the powerful among the people and institutions of North
America were more than willing that the society of the white South
should be broken. The civil rights movement had behind it all the pow-
erful forces of the American empire. It marched protected by federal
88 Politics and Morality

troops, it had the blessing of the leading government figures. It was

encouraged night after night by NBC and CBS. There was violence
from the white South, but the white South is not an important part of
the American power elite. It will surely be a different matter when the
protests are against some position which is dear and close to the Amer-
ican liberal establishment. We have only to think of how much is imme-
diately accomplished by protests about Vietnam, the Dominican
Republic, or nuclear policy. Anyway, dissent and protest are themselves
bureaucratized in our society. They are taken into the system and trivi-
alized. They are made to serve the interest of the system they are sup-
posed to be attacking, by showing that free speech is allowed.
I am not advocating inaction or cynicism. Nothing I have said denies
for one moment the nobility of protest. Nothing I have said denies that
justice is good and that injustice is evil and that it is required of human
beings to know the difference between the two. To live with courage in
the world is always better than retreat or disillusion. Human beings are
less than themselves when they are cut off from being citizens. Indeed
one of the finest things about the present protest movements in North
America is that they try to give meaning to citizenship in a society which
by its enormity and impersonality cuts people off from the public
world. Anybody who lives within a university must know that the stu-
dents who care enough about the world to protest are much finer than
those who are interested in public affairs simply because they want to
climb within the system and use it to gain recognition for their egos.
Indeed, how much finer are those who protest than those who crawl
through the university simply as a guarantee of the slow road to death
in the suburbs. In our monolithic society, the pressures upon the indi-
vidual to retreat from the public sphere are immense. The new politics
of protest have tried to overcome those pressures and to give new
meaning to citizenship. Nobody should attack them for that.
What I am arguing against is the politics based on easy hopes about
the future human situation. The hope, for example, that some future
transformation of power in North American is going to overcome the
implicit difficulties of the technological apparatus, that North Ameri-
can society can in the future be radically changed in its direction. Hope
in the future has been the chief opiate of modern life. And nobody is
more responsible for dipping out that opiate than Marx. Its danger is
that it prevents men from looking clearly at their situation. It teaches
them to dream instead of coming to terms with facts. The most danger-
ous quality of the politics of Utopia is that it can easily turn into despair.
 The Vietnam War 89

If people have vast expectations of hope about a society such as ours,

they are going to be disappointed and then their moral fervour can
turn rancid and bitter. Moral fervour is too precious a commodity not
to be put in the service of reality.
If protest is to be effective in this era, if we are to be successful in cre-
ating space for human spontaneity in the iron maiden of the technical
apparatus we have created, then it is essential that those who are in the
forefront of protest must combine with their actions the deepest and
most careful thought. Action without thought will be an impotent waste
of time. In this ferocious era, if we are to keep ourselves human and to
be effective citizens, then our first obligation is to be free. And by free
I mean knowing the truth about things, to know what is so, without sim-
plifications, without false hope, without moral fervour divorced from
moral clarity. The central Christian platitude still holds good. 'The truth
shall make you free.' I use freedom here quite differently from those
who believe that we are free when we have gained mastery over man and
over nature. It is different even from the simple cry for political liberty:
'Freedom now.' For in the long pull freedom without the knowledge of
reality is empty and vacuous. The greatest figure of our era, Gandhi, was
interested in public actions and in political liberty, but he knew that the
right direction of that action had to be based on knowledge of reality -
with all the discipline and order and study that that entailed.
Truth seeking is of course hard to accomplish in this society. Our
universities have at many points retreated from it into fact gathering
and technological mastery, what is now called the knowledge industry.
Most of our social scientists have used the idea of a value-free social sci-
ence to opt out of the battle of what constitutes the good society, and
spend their time in discovering techniques for adjusting people to the
system. The philosophers have often opted out to play clever profes-
sional games. Much of the religious tradition seems a worn-out gar-
ment and not able to help in the search for truth. Above all, what may
hold people from the search for the truth is that the human situation in
the totally realized mass world may be so unpalatable that we simple do
not want to face it. If we do not face reality we may be able to avoid the
great evils of despair and pessimism, but we also cut ourselves off from
any chance of maturity and effectiveness.
I have concentrated on North America, because we in North Amer-
ica are inevitably in the forefront of the world. We are the society that
has most completely realized the dominance of technique over every
aspect of human life. Every year we are moving with prodigious speed
90 Politics and Morality

to the greater and greater realization of that system. All other societies
move at various speeds to the same kind of society we are creating. We
are the first people who will have to learn what it is to be citizens in a
society dominated by technique. Because that system is most fully real-
ized with us, we are the first people who can look it in the face and we
are called upon to see it for what it is and not fool ourselves about it. We
must face the laws of its necessity - its potential to free men from natu-
ral necessity, its potential for inhumanity and tyranny. We must not
delude ourselves and we must not throw up our hands. We must define
our possible areas of influence with the most careful clarity. Where in
this mammoth system can we use our intelligence and our love to open
up spaces in which human excellence can exist? How can we use the
most effective pressure to see that our empire uses moderation and
restraint in its relations with the rest of the world? I end where I began,
that our greatest obligation as Canadians is to work for a country which
is not simply a satellite of any empire.

NOTE

1 J. Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf
1964).

Although Grant did not believe in civil disobedience in the Canadian context, he
strongly believed in the right and the duty of every person to take a public stand
on important moral issues in the hope of influencing public opinion.

The Value of Protest (1966)

The desire to stop the war in Vietnam should not be limited to people
of any political party or any political philosophy. It should be common
to all men who hate crime and injustice. And as Senator Fulbright' has

George Grant, 'The Vietnam War: The Value of Protest,' an address delivered on 14 May
1966 in Toronto at a demonstration for peace in Vietnam.
American Senator J.W. Fulbright (1905-95) at first supported the Vietnam war; how-
ever, by the beginning of 1966 he had begun to criticize the war and by 1967 was openly
in opposition.
 The Vietnam War 91

made clear, it should be common to all North Americans who have the
long-range interests of this continent in their minds.
All decent people, if they look at the facts, must know that what is
being done in Vietnam by President Johnson and his legions is the
waging of an unjust war, by atrocious means. It is war which can only be
won by the terrible means of genocide. What the American govern-
ment is saying to a country, thousands of miles from their shores, is that
Vietnam must do what we want or it will be destroyed. Let us remember
that the bombing of the northern half of the country is not as terrible
as the bombing of the southern half. In the current year twice as many
bombs as were dropped in the whole of the Korean war are going to be
dropped in the southern part of Vietnam - the country the Americans
are supposedly saving. A few months ago I met some American profes-
sors who were in favour of their country's policy, and I asked them what
was their policy for Vietnam and they said 'We are going to pave it.'
That is, rather than let it out of the American grip, they will totally
demolish its civilization.
All the complex problems of international politics - the confronta-
tion of the American and Chinese empires, the meeting of industrial
and non-industrial cultures - do not cloak the central fact about the
Vietnam War, which is this: we of this continent have in the last year
unequivocally embarked on a policy which means the extermination of
masses of the Vietnamese people. It is this which makes this war the
most horrible thing that has happened in the world since the destruc-
tion of the European Jews. It is this fact which requires that all North
Americans of good conscience should protest and protest till this war is
brought to an end. The horrors of the twentieth century have been
manifold; but this must be the worst one for North Americans because
we are doing it.
Canadians cannot escape from their involvement in this crime. Obvi-
ously, most Canadians want to use what independence we have left to
keep ourselves from being any more directly implicated in that war than
we already are. But morally our position is a queer one. In the same
week that our prime minister makes a cautious move towards peace,

Lyndon B.Johnson (1908-73), president of the United States, 1963-9. Johnson suc-
ceeded to the presidency on John F. Kennedy's assassination. Although he was a propo-
nent of an expanded welfare state in his domestic policies, his presidency became
increasingly entangled in the Vietnam War and his unpopular policies eventually forced
him to withdraw from the 1968 presidential campaign.
92 Politics and Morality

another member of the government demands that Canada be given a

greater share in the continental defence production. Indeed, Canadi-
ans may emphasize their independence, but such independence can-
not deny our long-term deep involvement in the injustice which is
being perpetrated. Canadians are finally and inescapably North Amer-
icans - members of Western society. That society as a whole - not only
the United States - is losing any honourable reputation it had with the
rest of the world, because of the conduct of this war. The longer this war
continues the more terrible will be the whirlwind that Western men will
reap because of it. You don't have to be an anti-American to see this.
That great American patriot, Senator Fulbright, has shown this in crys-
tal clarity for all to see. The longer this terrible war is continued, the
deeper and deeper becomes the legacy of hatred that Asians are laying
up against all of us North Americans. Canadians who see beyond the
ends of their noses should see this - whatever their political persuasion.
Both conscience and self-interest should, therefore, unite to make us
protest the continual escalation of this war.
Canadians seem to be getting used to this war. Fifteen months ago
the truly massive American escalation started. As it grows and grows, we
seem more and more willing to take it for granted. To a society which
wants continual new excitements it becomes more important whether
two entertainers are kicked off a television show than whether we are
massacring Asians. Who slept with whom nearly a decade ago seems to
engage our prime minister's attention more than this terrible calamity.
Newspapers and television seek the new sensation in a society that can-
not long pay attention to anything. And this lack of care seems worse in
Canada than in the United States. For even as we seek a greater share in
defence production, we say that Vietnam is not really our business; we
can turn aside. One of the worst things about the affluent imperialism
we live in in North America is that masses of people can be led easily
from acquiescence to indifference about the terrible things that their
society is perpetrating in other parts of the world. A country which will
scream its head off about a television programme and be silent about
Vietnam is surely sick.
Of course, there are many who care deeply about what is happening
in this war - but who say to themselves 'What is the use of protesting?'
Our protests do nothing and can do nothing against the determination
of those who have the power in Washington. Look at what has hap-
pened in the last year. The teach-ins and marches and demonstrations
of a year ago haven't stopped the escalation of the war. Even the cour-
 The Vietnam War 93

age of Senator Fulbright and Senator Morse, in the greatest American

legislative body, hasn't done any good. The number of American
troops and planes grows; the ferocity of the bombing in both the north-
ern and southern parts of the country has increased in the last weeks.
Even the demonstrations by the people of Vietnam in their own coun-
try do not seem to have swayed Presidentjohnson. He is determined to
get his way even if it means making the country a desert.
More and more people say that in a technological society such as
ours the actions and thoughts of the individuals do not count and as
the central executive in Washington is set on massacre there is nothing
that can be done. But who can be sure that this is true? Let us look at
what has happened in the last year. Who can say that if there hadn't
been widespread protests there would ever have been the hearings in
the Senate or that those hearings would have been televised? And those
hearings have evidently got through to a lot of voters and Johnson for
all his consensus still has to face elections in November. Who can say
that as powerful a figure as Senator Kennedy^ would have come out for
negotiations with the National Liberation Front if he wasn't aware that
right throughout society there were people who hated the war and
were aware of some of the facts of that war? Without the protests there
would have been far fewer of such people. Even in Canada who can tell
how much further this country would have been directly implicated in
the war if politicians were not aware that there was deep suspicion of
the American government's motives right across this country? And let
us never forget that there are powerful forces in this continent who
push for Canada to be more deeply implicated in the prosecution of
the war. The pain and impotence that one feels as the war mounts in
ferocity must not blind us to the fact that without protest, we might be
in an even worse position than we are. In every situation in human life
it always matters what you do and this is a situation where protest must
go on.
Obviously, the first reason for protest is to try to stop the terrible
things that are being done in Vietnam. But there is another reason for

W.L. Morse (1900-74) sat in the U.S. Senate from 1945 to 1969, first as a Republican,
then as an Independent, and finally, from 1956, as a Democrat. His opposition to the
Vietnam War brought about his defeat in 1968.
Robert F. Kennedy (1925-68), brother of John F. Kennedy. Attorney general from 1961
to 1964, and a senator from 1965, he was assassinated in 1968 during his campaign for
the presidency.
94 Politics and Morality

protest even if you can't change events. We must keep alive in our soci-
ety the recognition that there is a difference between lies and truth.
Ours is a society where the most enormous pressure can be brought to
hide the truth and to make lies seem like truth. The weight of televi-
sion, press, and radio can be used to convince people that lies are truth.
The liberal society keeps itself going above all by propaganda, by sub-
merging people with propaganda. A society that feeds on propaganda
soon cannot tell the difference between lies and truth. The kind of peo-
ple who get to the top politically in a liberal society are those who have
learned that if it helps their cause to say something they will say it even
if they know it not to be true Nowhere has this been more evident than
in the speeches of Secretary of State Rusk and Vice President Hum-
phrey.^ When one hears some of the things they have been willing to
say about Vietnam, can one believe that they think they are telling the
truth? Perhaps Humphrey is dumb enough and corrupted enough by
his years of liberal rhetoric, but that cannot be the case with Rusk. Let
me take the simplest fact about Vietnam. By the Geneva accords it was
not meant that Vietnam should long be divided into southern and
northern sections. Yet the American officials have continually spoken
as if North and South Vietnam were separate countries and most peo-
ple in North America now believe this.
A society in which the difference between truth and lies disappears is
a society doomed for debasement. Because you can't make even fairly
reasonable decisions if you can't sort out facts from illusions. In private
life this is what we call madness, when people can't distinguish facts
from illusions. And it is just as much madness when it applies to whole
societies as when it applies to individuals. This is what happened in Ger-
many, enough people came to believe illusions about the Jews. This is
one service the protest movement must perform in this society. It must
break through the curtain of lies and half-truths and tell what is really
happening in Vietnam. For we will be truly lost if we bring up our chil-
dren in a society where lies are not called lies.
To finish, the worst thing about Vietnam is the terrible suffering of
the Vietnam peasants; the second worst thing is the lies and perversion
of the truth which is eating away at the soul of our society.
Dean Rusk (1901-89), American secretary of state, 1961-70. Rusk served under presi-
dents Kennedy and Johnson and was a dedicated opponent of communist expansion.
He was closely associated with the American involvement in Vietnam.
Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr (1911-78), vice-president of the United States under Lyndon
Johnson 1965-9. He lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon.
 The United States as a Technological Society 95

THE UNITED STATES AS A

TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Lyndon Johnson ran for presidency of the United States in 1964 on the slogan
'The Great Society,' a domestic program that was to include the Civil Rights Act
of 1965 and Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. However, for Grant, American
domestic achievements paled beside U.S. military actions in Vietnam. In 1967 he
returned to Couchiching to take his warnings about the Vietnam War and what
it implied for the United States to a larger and more mainstream audience than
student radicals.

As a Canadian I have always believed in the use of the national state as a means
of protecting Canadian independence. On the other hand, in the general eco-
nomic situation of North America I dislike the concentration of power that is
taking place in the hands of Washington. I would not have found it impossible
as an American to have voted for Senator Goldwater on domestic, but not on
international issues. I unequivocally would have voted for General Eisenhower^
in both elections. - George Grant to George Hogan, 26 April 1965

It is easy to be against nationalism when one is a member of a nation which is

the centre of a great empire. But think of the other side: may it be a good thing
to be nationalist when one is defending a communal existence against that
empire? The alternative to nationalism for small communities is not interna-
tionalism but a dominance of their existence by empires. This seems to me as
true of communities near the Russian empire as it is those near the American;
though the ability of a capitalist empire maybe more insidious than the more
blatant means of a communist empire.
- George Grant to John Robertson, 9 October 1969

The Great Society 1967+

First, what is meant by the Great Society? It is a vision of a society of free

Barry Goldwater (1909- ) was the conservative Republican candidate for the presidency
in 1964. He was soundly beaten by Johnson.
Dwight Eisenhower was Republican president of the United States, 1953-61.
George Grant, Comments on the Great Society at the 35th Annual Couchiching Confer-
ence, in Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, ed. John Irwin (Toronto: Canadian Broad-
casting Corporation 1967). 71-7.
96 Politics and Morality

and equal men, to be realized through the application of certain prin-

ciples. These principles are to be taken seriously because they are enun-
ciated by President Johnson as determining the policies of the
American government. These basic principle are, in essence, two:
(1) By the application of those sciences which issue in the mastery of
human and non-human nature, it will be possible to build a society of
free and equal human beings.
(2) The application of these mastering sciences should be carried out
by a system which can be quickly described as 'state corporation capital-
ism'; that is, by the co-operation of the public and private corporations.
In stating these two principles it is useful to add that this continent is
much the most advanced in the application of the sciences which result
in the control of human and non-human nature. The chief reasons for
this are that the dominating immigrant groups came from Western
Europe, and it is in Western Europe that modern science and its mutu-
ally interdependent political ideas arose. The people with these ideas
took over a continent of vast resources and unified the wealthy part of
it under a modern system of government. When the second and
greater wave of the technological revolution began to crest after 1945,
the continent had not been ravaged by war and was ready both materi-
ally and in spirit to build a society based on this technology. In short,
North America is far ahead in building a universal and homogeneous
society of free and equal men, and since 1945 such a society can be con-
sidered not simply a dream but a possibility.
One might proceed by pointing out the actual results of the applica-
tion of the Great Society principles in our society, and trying thereby to
judge the principles themselves. To support distrust of these principles
one could point at domestic and international phenomena which give
one pause. One could describe the quality of life which is arising in the
great megalopoleis; what life is like in the bureaucracies of the public and
private corporation; the ruthlessness of the society to those who cannot
succeed by the standards of prestige and acquisition; the impersonality
and vacuousness of its educational institutions; the pursuit of titillation
and shock in its artistic and sexual life; the derootedness of mobility
and the impossibility of effective citizenship, etc., etc. It could be
pointed out, also, that this society seems increasingly violent and mas-
terful in its dealings with the rest of the world. I say this because I think
it quite appropriate to judge the Great Society, not only by its domestic,
but by its international actions. But as my job is to concentrate on
 The United States as a Technological Society 97

North America, I must avoid any implication that all the evils of the
international order can be laid at the door of Washington. I do not
intend to minimize the difficulties that any government of the Ameri-
can empire would have in its confrontation with the Soviet and Chinese
empires. It must be recognized, however, that as the Great Society
develops it exercises extreme violence in its relations with the rest of
the world. Look at the growing number of military regimes among the
satellites of the American empire in South America and Africa. Above
all, we cannot disassociate what is happening in Vietnam from the prin-
ciples of the Great Society. That ferocious exercise in imperial violence
must surely be part of our pointing. Mastery extends to every part of the
globe.
Nevertheless, it is not through looking at these particular applica-
tions of principles that we come to a final judgment of these principles.
Not only could the supporters of the Great Society point to certain
good results, which would turn the debate into a simple listing of black
and white, but with more force its supporters could claim that the bad
results of the Great Society are but temporary aberrations or faulty
applications of the principles, and will be overcome at a later stage on
the road of progress. For example, if these supporters of the Great Soci-
ety were marxists (and even Johnson's speeches are often good marx-
ism coated with Billy Graham ) they could say that once the Great
Society frees itself from the anomalies of the old capitalism, it will rid
itself of many of its domestic evils. Again, they might claim that the
impersonality of the big cities will be overcome by the more careful use
of social science. We need more social science to cure the ills which sci-
ence has created. Or, if they are liberals, they could say with the vice-
president that once America is freed from the necessity of standing up
against the aggression of a relentless communist imperialism, it will be
possible for it to enjoy the full glories of the Great Society both domes-
tically and internationally. In short, the argument from results does not
allow us really to get at the principles of the Great Society and to judge
them as they are in themselves.
The true issue in this discussion turns around the first principle of
the Great Society as I enunciated it earlier. That was the claim, that, by
the application of those sciences which lead to the mastery of human
and non-human nature, we will be able eventually to build a society of

Billy Graham (1918-), a charismatic evangelical American clergyman who used radio,
television, and movies to reach a large audience.
98 Politics and Morality

free and equal men. This is the proposition that must be discussed.
Before doing so, let me say two things about it. (1) That proposition
embodies the religion of this society. Religion means what men bow
down to, and the great public religion of this society is the bowing
down to technology. It is never easy to discuss the truth or falsity of a
society's religion when in the midst of that society. (2) This religion,
which is most completely realized in North America but which is com-
ing to be in all parts of the world, has deep roots in the most influential
thought of the West in the last centuries. It is the essence of modern lib-
eralism and that liberalism has been the dominating influence of mod-
ern thought for three or four hundred years. We are living in the era
when the great thoughts of Western liberalism are being actualized.
For these reasons the question I am asking about this idea of technolog-
ical progress and mastery is not whether it is going to survive. Certainly
the mass of men cannot be turned back from the realization by argu-
ment. To debate whether this principle should dominate the future
would be like debating whether water should run downhill. What I am
questioning is whether societies dedicated to this pursuit of technolog-
ical control are going to find it indeed a means to their final end;
whether the application of this principle can in fact result in a Great
Society of free and equal men, a society that promotes human excel-
lence; or whether the nature of the means will not determine an end of
quite another complexion.
We may be born with Downs Syndrome. We find ourselves in a world
where we are the victims of chance, chance which limits the possibility
of our partaking in human excellence. Modern science which issues in
mastery arose above all from the desire to overcome chance. Let me say
here what I mean by human excellence. There are two purposes to
human existence: to live together well in communities and to think.
These two ends are distinct, because thinking is not simply a means for
living together. I will not go into the conflict that often in actuality
arises between these two ends. I mean by human excellence the realiza-
tion in people of the various virtues necessary to the achievement of
these two purposes. It is no accident that the modern experiment
should have arisen in the religious ethos it did, in the sense that mod-
ern science is so closely related to charity. Science was turned from con-
templation to mastery so that by the overcoming of chance the good
life would be made open to all. Yet we should contemplate the ambigu-
ity that in the achievement of that mastery we have built a monolithic
apparatus which becomes ever more tyrannous. Tyranny is, of course,
 The United States as a Technological Society 99

the greatest political foe of excellence. It denies both the chief ends of
man - living well together and thinking.
Let me illustrate. To overcome economic chance we have built our
economic system. This leads to the birth of enormous numbers of peo-
ple. The need arises to limit the population, both in what we call
underdeveloped nations in the first stage of industrialization, and also
in highly developed nations. Beyond quantitative proliferation, there
is also the question of quality. Why should we leave to chance (and
indeed as we all know to some very strange chances) the quality of peo-
ple coming into the world. Modern scientific studies mean that sun
and man need no longer generate men haphazardly. But both quanti-
tative and qualitative control must mean enormously powerful institu-
tions to exercise that control. Is a man who has to get a licence to have
children a free man? Of course, what is replied here is that the mod-
ern masters will not control others by force (except when absolutely
necessary) but by the use of social sciences will adjust people so that
they will want the socially useful. It is claimed that it will be possible to
avoid tyranny by the inculcation of the truths of social science through
mass communication. 'This Hour Has Seven Days.' But will not this
central thought control be just as tyrannous as the old methods? If one
believes that the needs of the soul are the most important it will be
more tyrannous. And beyond that the question remains whether
adjustment to socially useful attitudes can be equated with the good-
ness once defined as the cultivation of the virtues. Can living together
well be produced by mass propaganda or can it only be achieved by
free men pursuing virtue through their own motion? Beyond living
well together, the mass stimulation of socially useful attitudes can cer-
tainly not be conducive to the other end of man - thinking. To put the
matter generally: can men live well together within the enormous insti-
tutions necessary to the massive overcoming of chance? To take but
one point: I assume that one aspect of human excellence is to take part
in the major political decisions of one's community. Is this possible
under modern institutions? Professor McLuhan suggests that the new
democratic politics will consist in men learning the facts on an issue
over television, and then regularly, perhaps daily, registering a plebi-
scite on a great computer system. This does not seem to me at all the
same thing as the traditional partaking by free men in political activity.
Who will control the televisions? Who will decide what are the facts?

A satirical Canadian current-affairs television program, which ran from 1964 to 1966.
100 Politics and Morality

Solitary men living in megalopokis, not being able to know their leaders,
pushing computer buttons are not free men, or equal men. To sum
up: the overcoming of chance to which we are committed builds insti-
tutions which more and more negate the freedom and equality for the
sake of which the whole experiment against chance was undertaken.
And the ambiguity goes deeper: the building of the universal and
homogeneous state by mastery was the chief ideal of Western liberal
theory. If the achievement of that end can now more and more be
seen as the achievement of tyranny, then the theory can no longer be
accepted.
I cannot, in a short space, deal with the difficulty in which we are left.
Man has to overcome chance to some degree to form communities at
all; yet the drive for the total overcoming of chance leads to tyrannies.
What degree of the overcoming of chance is necessary for the good
society? The anthropologist Levi-Strauss says that the best order for
man was what we call the neolithic era in which man had gained suffi-
cient control to build organic communities and to give him time to
contemplate. I do not know what the answer is.
Despite my diagnosis of potential tyranny, I am not advocating the
dreaming of anti-social dreams. The immoderation of technique can-
not be met by the immoderation of retreat from society. At all times
and in all places it always matters what we do. Man is by nature a social
being, therefore it is a kind of self-castration to try to opt out of the soci-
ety one is in. There are going to be many wounds to be bound up in our
world. Who cannot admire those young people who work among the
Metis or who work for almost nothing in poverty projects, or who care
for truth in the multiversity? When I read the new journal This Magazine
Is about Schools produced in Toronto by young men who care desper-
ately that education be more than our provincial efficiency nightmare,
and who are willing to forgo the world of acquisition and prestige to
produce such a magazine, I cannot doubt that such things are worth
doing. Just because our fate is to live in a concrete empire - half garri-
son and half marketplace - we cannot opt for that mysticism, LSD or
otherwise, which tries to reach the ultimate joy by bypassing our imme-
diate relations and responsibilities in the world.
Finally I would tentatively suggest that the virtue most necessary for
this era is what I would call openness. This quality is the exact opposite
of control or mastery. Mastery tries to shape the objects and people

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-), French anthropologist and the founder of structuralism.

 The United States as a Technological Society 101

around us into a form which suits us. Openness tries to know what
things are in themselves, not to impose our categories upon them.
Openness acts on the assumption that other things and people have
their own goodness in themselves; control believes that the world is
essentially neutral stuff which can only be made good by human effort.
Openness is a virtue most difficult to realize in our era as it requires
daily the enormous discipline of dealing with our own closedness,
aggressions, and neuroses, be they moral, intellectual, or sexual. To be
open in an age of tyrannical control will above all require courage.

Professor Grant, in reply to questions:

Technology is creating a global situation, very similar whether it be in

Russia, in time in China, perhaps in India, as in the United States. I see
the United States as the most advanced industrial society on earth.
Therefore, what is coming to be in the United States is what is coming
to be in the rest of the world. Now I do not see how you can have decen-
tralization of power when you need enormous institutions to run
things. I do not think you can produce General Motor cars without
something like General Motors, whether it is privately owned or pub-
licly owned.
Now, let me say that tyranny is a very pressing problem, because in my
view of life, the world is eternal, not created, and tyranny is a danger
coeval with the world, with man, as cancer is a danger coeval with man.
I think that there is no danger in stressing that. Now I do not, therefore,
see how any revolution could replace centralized power in highly tech-
nological societies. I just do not see how it is going to happen.
Modern Western man has been committed for three hundred years
to the building of an enormous technological apparatus which is now
spreading into the rest of the world. I think you can live perfectly well in
a tyrannical regime. I am just saying that the technological era is com-
ing and is going to be a tyranny. Now I would try and do everything I
could to limit that tyranny. I do it by trying to teach things about
ancient religions and philosophy at university. Other people do it by
writing or going and working with the Metis. I would personally be
much more interested in politics if I lived in French-speaking Canada
but as I live in English-speaking Canada, which is a satellite of the Great
Society, about all I can do is carry out my private duties and think my
private thoughts. There is not much that anybody can do to stop this
tyranny from being; one simply has to live through it.
102 Politics and Morality

Let me say that I think that if you have a highly technological society
it has to be very largely corporate. This is why I have very great sympathy
for what is going on in Quebec.
I would point out that the Great Society is an idea that really grew in
the United States. Let us start in 1932 with Roosevelt. Since 1932 the
United States has become the greatest empire in world history, greater
than Rome. In the last few years, it has been able to upset the govern-
ment of Brazil, the government of the Argentine, been able to upset
governments all over Africa - do you not call that an empire? It seems
to me to be indubitably an empire, although obviously a different kind
of empire from the colonial empires the English and French had. The
Nation magazine calls U.S. action in Vietnam, 'welfare imperialism.'
We surely must face the fact that, as Marx said and as I have observed,
social progress in America has always been impeded by great outbreaks
of nationalism.
On the other hand, a society that is committed to technology is com-
mitted to continual change. This is why other societies like the English
do not commit themselves to technology; they do not want continual
change. In the three religions I know best, Hinduism, Buddhism, and
the Greek religion, the intellectuals turned their backs on technology.
The Greeks were aware there was such a thing as algebra, which is the
basis of technological training, but they literally refused to allow it into
their society. I imagine you would find similar objections from some of
the Buddhists in Vietnam. They are terrified by what is coming, obvi-
ously, terrified of the technological society.

PIERRE TRUDEAU

In the late 1960s the Quebec terrorist organization, the Front de liberation du
Quebec, began to accelerate its campaign for Quebec independence. It kidnapped
a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister in October 1970, and Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau put the country under martial law. Grant opposed this
assault on civil liberties, which he thought was a manifestation of Trudeau's
technological understanding of the world. His hostility to Trudeau increased
over the years.

Trudeau has always seemed to be a gentlemanly kind of person. I distrust his

 Pierre Trudeau 103

distrust of traditional French Canada and I fear his naivety about the nature of
English-speaking society.
- George Grant to Hugh MacLennan, 27 March 1969

The [forces] of independence -whether traditional or radical - are really little

waves on the surface. Trudeau is a kind of Canadian Kennedy - a shallow poli-
tician who makes people think this vulgar society has a slick patina to it.
- George Grant to Derek Bedson, 26 July 1974

As for Trudeau, he incites me to rage. It is very good that now all the provinces,
except Ontario, know that he is trying to destroy their autonomy as societies.
- George Grant to Gaston Laurion, 19 March 1981

Nationalism and Rationality (1971 )*

The politics of technologized societies are an open field for demagogic

tactics. Politics is the working out of public disagreement about pur-
poses. But politics is now increasingly replaced by administration, as
disagreement about purposes is legitimized away by the pervasive
assumption that all which publicly matters is the achievement of tech-
nical 'rationality.' Elections become increasingly plebiscites in which
the masses choose between leaders or teams who will be in charge of
the administrative personnel. In plebiscites it is necessary to have lead-
ers who can project their images through the various media, and so
catch the interest of the masses who are bored with politics, except as
spectacle and as the centralizing organization for technologized life.
The plebiscitary situation calls forth from the privileged classes leaders
who have the will to project their personalities and as these men are
increasingly the product of the modern 'value-free' university, they are
likely to be willing to use any means when it suits their interests. A neg-
ative example of this thesis is Mr Nixon. It is inconceivable that he
could have been elected President in 1968 without the administrative
disaster of the Vietnam War which exposed the blatant failure of the
Democratic personnel to provide what was wanted at the home of the
empire. For all his administrative reliability and talent, he simply
lacked the image for the plebiscites in comparison with his Republican
predecessor or his Democratic alternatives.

George Grant, 'Nationalism and Rationality,' Canadian Forum, January 1971, 336-7.
104 Politics and Morality

In recent Canadian events there have been two successful plebisci-

tary leaders - Mr Diefenbaker and Mr Trudeau. Mr Diefenbaker had,
however, one grave disadvantage. He had certain residual loyalties (for
example, to the independence of Canada) which acted against the
demands of 'rationality' and administration. Therefore, despite his
ability to transmit his image he came into conflict with the sheer needs
of the private and public corporations - that is, with state capitalist
'rationality' itself. He could not continue to get votes in the parts of
Canada which were most enmeshed in that continental administrative
system, and where the voters were most at the mercy of the legitimizing
powers of that system. But Mr Pearson lacked the plebiscitary appeal so
that he could not get an outright majority even although his actions
were acceptable to continental administrative 'rationality.'
Mr Trudeau combines plebiscitary appeal with acceptance of the
assumptions of the state capitalist 'rationality.' He must therefore be
seen as a formidable figure in our public life. In his writings he has
unequivocally stated that he believes the best future for French Canadi-
ans is to be integrated into the Canadian structure as a whole, and that
the Canadian structure should be integrated into the whole Western
system (if not in an overtly political sense, at least economically and
socially). Throughout his career his appeals have been to universalism,
and universalism in a Canadian setting means integration into a
smooth functioning continental system. It is this union in Mr Trudeau
of charisma with the acceptance of the purposes of corporation capital-
ist efficiency which made Mr Denis Smith's article about his policies so
telling. The idea that Mr Trudeau was changing our political frame-
work from a parliamentary to a presidential system involves more than
a change from Canadian to American traditions. This change in politi-
cal structure would fulfil the needs of a society in which administrative
rule is bolstered by plebiscites about personnel.
In Mr Trudeau's writings there is evident distaste for what was by tra-
dition his own, and what is put up along with that distaste are universal-
ist goods which will be capable of dissolving that tradition. Indeed, this
quality of being a convert to modern liberalism is one cause of his for-
midability. Most English-speaking liberals have lived in universalism
much longer. They have not come to it out of something different, but
have grown up in it as their tradition. They are apt, therefore, either to
accept it automatically or even to start to be cynical about its ability to
solve human problems. On the other hand, Mr Trudeau's espousal has
 Pierre Trudeau 105

behind it the force of his distaste of its opposite against which he is

reacting. Recent converts are especially effective exponents of a system
because they have the confidence of believing they are doing right.
Mr Trudeau combines, then, administrative reliability with the
power to project his image in the plebiscites. In 1968 this image was par-
tially a revamped Kennedy one - openness to youth and freedom, a
marvelous expectation about the potentialities of our system (no inter-
ference in the bedrooms of the nation etc.). This was effective in the
Canada of Expo, especially because there was an awareness that things
were not going as well in the U.S.A. as the Americans had expected at
the beginning of the Kennedy era. Tacitly behind this part of this
image, and clearly related to it, was the sense, in English-speaking Can-
ada, that here at last was a French Canadian who would deal with
Daniel Johnson' and De Gaulle. + Mr Trudeau came to power by a bril-
liant use of television around that constitutional encounter. Indeed,
many of the smartest media men who now deplore his recent actions
had helped him to organize that use. At its worse, Mr Trudeau was for
many English-speaking Canadians that happy phenomenon 'A Frog
who could deal with the Frogs.' In his recent actions he has fulfilled for
them that promise. As he said in October, 1970, 'Just watch me.'
I leave aside the intriguing question of why the Trudeau administra-
tion embarked on the War Measures Act and I do so having taken for
granted that the government had sufficient power, without its invoca-
tion, to deal firmly with what was happening in Quebec. The question
then arises: Does his employment of these powers make Mr Trudeau a
more or less effective plebiscitary leader in Canadian life? As far as
French Canada goes, a useful answer could only be made by somebody
with great knowledge of Quebec from the inside. How deep is the desire
on the part of many French Canadians to exist as a Franco-American
community in the midst of the homogenized English-speaking sea? Is
the French-Canadian question truly a political one, in the sense that the
powers of administrative rationality cannot dissolve it?
Obscurity is increased by the fact that two different voices of opposi-

The Montreal world's fair of 1967 coincided with Canada's centenary and was the focus
of the year's celebrations.
Daniel Johnson was the Union Nationale premier of Quebec, 1966-8, and a strong
defender of Quebec's powers against federal encroachment.
Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970), president of France, 1958-69.
106 Politics and Morality

tion to Mr Trudeau seem to be coming out of Quebec. On the one

hand, there is the voice of nationalism, expressed particularly by mem-
bers of the elite, who care about the continuance of their community
and who know that Mr Bourassa's slogan 'American technology -
French culture' cannot be an adequate basis for any real survival. On
the other hand are the inchoate voices of those who are the particular
victims of the fact that Quebec came late into the American technolog-
ical expansion - e.g. the people of east Montreal and the students who
cannot get jobs. These voices seem to employ the mode of popular
marxism. What is the relation between these two forms of opposition?
It has often been possible for marxists to appear as supporters of
nationalism, for example as resisters of western invasion in Russia or
China. But clearly at its heart marxism is a universalist and not a nation-
alist doctrine, and just as much as Mr Trudeau's liberalism, it puts the
development of technique as its priority. Also, since Quebec is at the
very heart geographically of the Western empire, it is going to be mod-
ernized within the setting of capitalist rationality - not marxist. Within
that setting marxism will be simply an ideology for the sympathetic, an
opiate for the unfortunate. The responses of the student population
will be crucial. Can enough of them be won over from their national-
ism, as Mr Trudeau has predicted, if Quebec is effectively oriented into
the American system and enough managerial jobs are provided for the
educated? Has capitalist rationality the means of bringing about that
integration quickly enough?
In English-speaking Canada it seems that Mr Trudeau's status will
remain high. He has come through on his promise to deal strongly
with separatism. That he deals with it quite outside the principles of
constitutional liberties does not seem important, because although
these traditions of law were the best part of British tradition, they are
not something that can hold masses of voters' minds in the age of tech-
nological rationality. Civil liberties can be a supplementary issue in
times of bad employment or in connection with other failures of the
system, but they cannot be a determining issue for many voters who
live within modernity.
Indeed, in the extreme circumstances of the War Measures Act, the
two main political questions of Canadian life come together for those

Robert Bourassa (1933-96), premier of Quebec 1970-6, 1986-93, a moderate nationalist

who was more interested in modernizing and rationalizing the Quebec economy than
pursuing constitutional reform.
 Pierre Trudeau 107

of us who must oppose what the Trudeau administration has done.

The possibility of some freedom in the American empire is mutually
interdependent with some potential modus vivendi between English-
speaking and French-speaking Canadians. But it is hard to move from
this relation to practical judgments about immediate Canadian poli-
tics. On the one hand, it is obvious that any indigenous English-speak-
ing Canadian society requires the help of Quebec. Yet how can this be
advocated in a way that is not simply asking French Canadians to be
led along to their doom as a community? In other words, are the
French not best to be separatists in the face of the North American sit-
uation? This dilemma for English-speaking nationalists is even more
evident because of the events of the autumn. Before these events, a
certain nationalist spirit seemed to be growing in English-speaking
society. This was encouraged by the obvious social failures of the
United States, and also by the economic consequences of being a
branch-plant society, which were coming home to many Canadians at
a time of American retreat. Yet during the crisis in Quebec, a large
English-speaking majority readily acquiesced in an attack not only on
terrorism but on constitutional French nationalism. In the light of
this, French Canadian nationalists would perhaps do well to concen-
trate on the possible means of their own cultural survival and to accept
that English-speaking culture is only a Trojan horse for the 'rational-
ity' of the North American monolith. What effective alliance can
English-speaking nationalists offer their French compatriots? How
would it be expressed in immediate political terms? What advantage
has it to offer those who seriously desire that Franco-American culture
survive in a more than formal sense? Mr Levesque's question to
English-speaking nationalists stands, and has been made more urgent
by the present crisis.

JUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO LIFE

Grant was invited to deliver the 1974 Wood lectures at Mount Allison Univer-
sity in Sackville, New Brunswick. Over tfie next three years he revised the manu-

Rene Levesque (1922-87), a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister who formed the
Parti Quebecois in 1968 and led it to successive election victories in 1976 and 1980.
108 Politics and Morality

script for publication and the result, English-Speaking Justice, was his most
sustained piece of political and philosophical analysis to date. He brought
together what he saw as the decay of liberalism in the United States with his
increasing concern for the right to life. The event that stimulated this analysis
was the American Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade (1973), which virtu-
ally legalized abortion on demand. Grant was particularly worried by Mr Justice
Blackmun 's decision, which denied any legal status to the foetus. From this time
on, the right-to-life movement was one of Grant's hading concerns and the right
to life was one of the shibboleths of his politics.

I would like to write-out at the moment the reasons why the 'contractualism'
which lies at the basis of English-speaking liberal moral philosophy seems to
me a failure and why one must try and understand morality as natural rather
than contractual. This would be a general lecture but it would centre around a
book which is very influential in the English-speaking world at the moment.
The book is called A Theory of Justice by ]o\\n Rawls - professor of philosophy at
Harvard. It is a brilliant attempt to talk of moral philosophy within the analyti-
cal tradition. I would like to take this book as a starting point and move out to
talk about what was good and what was inadequate in the tradition of English-
speaking liberalism. Would this be an appropriate lecture?
- George Grant to Alex Colville, 24 May 1973

English-Speaking Justice (1974)

English-speaking contractualism lies before us in the majority decision

of the American Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade.* In that decision their
highest court ruled that no state has the right to pass legislation which
would prevent a citizen from receiving an abortion during the first six
months of pregnancy. In that decision one can hear what is being spo-
ken about justice in such modern liberalism more clearly than in aca-
demic books which can be so construed as to skim questions when the

George Grant, English-Speaking Justice, the Josiah Wood Lectures, 1974 (Sackville, N.B.:
Mount Allison University 1974; repr. 1985 by House of Anansi and University of Notre
Dame Press with an 'Introduction' that states: 'The text is essentially the same as the
Mount Allison edition, except for the expansion of certain citations in the footnotes').
Excerpt. Used with permission.
In Roe v. Wade (1973), the American Supreme Court ruled by a 7-2 majority that women
have a constitutional right to abortion and that the foetus is not a person within the
meaning of the American constitution.
 Justice and the Right to Life 109

theory cuts. Theories of justice are inescapably defined in the necessi-

ties of legal decision.
Mr Justice Blackmun begins his majority decision from the princi-
ple that the allocation of rights from within the constitution cannot
be decided in terms of any knowledge of what is good. Under the con-
stitution, rights are prior to any account of the good. Appropriately he
quotes Mr Justice Holmes^ to this effect, who, more than any judge,
enucleated the principle that the constitution was based on the accep-
tance of moral pluralism in society, and that the pluralism was finally
justified because we must be properly agnostic about any claim to
knowledge of moral good. It was his influence in this fundamental
step towards a purely contractual interpretation of their constitution
that has above all enshrined him in American liberal hagiography. In
the decision, Blackmun interprets rights under the constitution as
concerned with the ordering of conflicting claims between 'persons'
and legislatures. The members of the legislature may have been per-
suaded by conceptions of goodness in passing the law in question.
However, this is not germane to a judge's responsibility, which is to
adjudicate between the rights of the mother and those of the legisla-
ture. He adjudicates that the particular law infringes the prior right of
the mother to control her own body in the first six months of preg-
nancy. The individual who would seem to have the greatest interest in
the litigation, because his or her life or death is at stake - namely the
particular foetus and indeed all future American foetuses - is said by
the judge not to be a party to the litigation. He states that the foetuses
up to six months are not persons, and as non-persons can have no sta-
tus in the litigation.
The decision then speaks modern liberalism in its pure contractual
form: right prior to good; a foundational contract protecting individ-
ual rights; the neutrality of the state concerning moral 'values'; social
pluralism supported by and supporting this neutrality. Indeed, the
decision has been greeted as an example of the nobility of American
contractarian institutions and political ideology, because the right of
an individual 'person' is defended in the decision against the power
of a majority in a legislature.

Harry A. Blackmun (1908- ), appointed by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court of the
United States in 1970. He wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.
0liver Wendell Holmes }r (1841-1935), one of the great American Supreme Court jus-
tices whom Grant had much admired in his vouth.
110 Politics and Morality

Nevertheless, however 'liberal' it may seem at the surface, it raises a

cup of poison to the lips of liberalism. The poison is presented in the
unthought ontology. In negating the right of existence for foetuses of
less than six months, the judge has to say what such foetuses are not.
They are not persons. But whatever else may be said of mothers and
foetuses, it cannot be denied that they are of the same species. Preg-
nant women do not give birth to cats. Also, it is a fact that the foetus is
not merely a part of the mother because it is genetically unique ab ini-
tio. In adjudicating for the right of the mother to choose whether
another member of her species lives or dies, the judge is required to
make an ontological distinction between members of the same species.
The mother is a person; the foetus is not. In deciding what is due in
justice to beings of the same species, he bases such differing dueness
on ontology. By calling the distinction ontological I mean simply that
the knowledge which the judge has about mothers and foetuses is not
scientific. To call certain beings 'persons' is not a scientific statement.
But once ontological affirmation is made the basis for denying the
most elementary right of traditional justice to members of our own
species, ontological questioning cannot be silenced at this point.
Because such a distinction has been made, the decision unavoidably
opens up the whole question of what our species is. What is it about
any members of our species which makes the liberal rights of justice
their due? The judge unwittingly looses the terrible question: Has the
long tradition of liberal right any support in what human beings in fact
are? Is this a question that in the modern era can be truthfully
answered in the positive? Or does it hand the cup of poison to our lib-
eralism?
This universal question is laid before us in the more particular ques-
tions arising from the decision. If foetuses are not persons, why should
not the state decide that a week-old, a two-year-old, a seventy- or eighty-
year-old is not a person 'in the whole sense'? On what basis do we draw
the line? Why are the retarded, the criminal, or the mentally ill per-
sons? What is it which divides adults from foetuses when the latter have
only to cross the bridge of time to catch up to the former? Is the deci-
sion saying that what makes an individual a person, and therefore the
possessor of rights, is the ability to calculate and assent to contracts?
Why are beings so valuable as to require rights, just because they are
capable of this calculation? What has happened to the stern demands

From the beginning (Latin).

 Justice and the Right to Life 111

of equal justice when it sacrifices the right to existence of the inarticu-

late to the convenience of the articulate? But thought cannot rest in
these particular questionings about justice. Through them we are
given the fundamental questions. What is it, if anything, about human
beings that makes the rights of equal justice their due? What is it about
human beings that makes it good that they should have such rights?
What is it about any of us that makes our just due fuller than that of
stones or flies or chickens or bears? Yet because the decision will not
allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note
as to how it would be answered in terms of our contemporary liberal-
ism, the decision 'Commends th'ingredients of our poison'd chalice /
To our own lips.'
The need to justify modern liberal justice has been kept in the wings
of our English-speaking drama by our power and the strengths of our
tradition. In such events as the decision on abortion it begins to walk
upon the stage. To put the matter simply: If 'species' is an historical
concept and we are a species whose origin and existence can be
explained in terms of mechanical necessity and chance, living on a
planet which also can be explained in such terms, what requires us to
live together according to the principles of equal justice?
For the last centuries a civilizational contradiction has moved our
Western lives. Our greatest intellectual endeavour — the new co-pene-
tration of logos and techne^ - affirmed at its heart that in understanding
anything we know it as ruled by necessity and chance. This affirmation
entailed the elimination of the ancient notion of good from the under-
standing of anything. At the same time, our day-to-day organization
was in the main directed by a conception of justice formulated in rela-
tion to the ancient science, in which the notion of good was essential
to the understanding of what is. This civilizational contradiction arose
from the attempt of the articulate to hold together what was given
them in modern science with a content of justice which had been
developed out of an older account of what is.
It must be emphasized that what is at stake in this contradiction is
not only the foundations of justice, but more importantly its content.
Many academics in many disciplines have described the difference
between the ancient and modern conceptions of justice as if it were
essentially concerned with differing accounts of the human situation.

Mnrbfth.Act 1, Sc. 7.
The Greek words for knowing and making, from which our word technology derives.
112 Politics and Morality

The view of traditional philosophy and religion is that justice is the

overriding order which we do not measure and define, but in terms of
which we are measured and defined. The view of modern thought is
that justice is a way which we choose in freedom, both individually and
publicly, once we have taken our fate into our own hands, and know
that we are responsible for what happens. This description of the dif-
ference has indeed some use for looking at the history of our race -
useful both to those who welcome and those who deplore the change
of view. Nevertheless, concentration on differing 'world views' dims
the awareness of what has been at stake concerning justice in recent
Western history. This dimming takes place in the hardly conscious
assumption that while there has been change as to what can be known
in philosophy, and change in the prevalence of religious belief among
the educated, the basic content of justice in our societies will somehow
remain the same. The theoretical differences in 'world views' are
turned over to the domain of 'objective' scholarship, and this scholar-
ship is carried out in protected private provinces anaesthetized from
any touch with what is happening to the content of justice in the heat
of the world. To feel the cutting edge of what is at stake in differing
foundations of justice it is necessary to touch those foundations as they
are manifested in the very context of justice.
The civilizational contradiction which beset Europe did not arise
from the question whether there is justice, but what justice is. Obvi-
ously any possible society must have some system of organization to
which the name 'justice' can be given. The contradiction arose
because human beings held onto certain aspects of justice which they
had found in the ancient account of good, even after they no longer
considered that that account of good helped them to understand the
way things are. The content of justice was largely given them from its
foundations in the Bible (and the classical philosophy which the early
Christians thought necessary for understanding the Bible) while they
understood the world increasingly in terms of modern technological
science.
The desire to have both what was given in the new knowledge, and
what was given us about justice in the religious and philosophical tradi-
tions, produced many conscious and unconscious attempts at practical
and theoretical reconciliations. It is these attempts which make it not
inaccurate to call the early centuries of modern liberal Europe the era
of secularized Christianity. It is an often repeated platitude that think-
ers such as Locke and Rousseau, Kant and Marx were secularized
 Justice and the Right to Life 113

Christians. (Of the last name it is perhaps better to apply the not so dif-
ferent label - secularized Jew.) The reason why an academic such as
Professor Rawls has been singled out for attention in this writing is as
an example of how late that civilizational contradiction has survived in
the sheltered intellectual life of the English-speaking peoples.
Indeed, the appropriateness of calling modern contractualism
'secularized Christianity' may be seen in the difference between mod-
ern contractualism and the conventionalism of the ancient world.
Although the dominant tradition of the ancient world was that justice
belonged to the order of things, there was a continuing minority report
that justice was simply a man-made convention. But what so startlingly
distinguishes this ancient conventionalism from our contractualism is
that those who advocated it most clearly also taught that the highest life
required retirement from politics. According to Lucretius, the wise
man knows that the best life is one of isolation from the dynamism of
public life. The dominant contractualist teachers of the modern world
have advocated an intense concern with political action. We are called
to the supremacy of the practical life in which we must struggle to estab-
lish the just contract of equality. When one asks what had been the
chief new public intellectual influence between ancient and modern
philosophy, the answer must be Western Christianity, with it insistence
on the primacy of charity and its implications for equality. Modern con-
tractualism's determined political activism relates it to its seedbed in
Western Christianity. Here again one comes upon that undefined pri-
mal affirmation which has been spoken of as concerned with 'will,' and
which is prior both to technological science and to revolution.
This public contradiction was not first brought into the light of day
in the English-speaking world. It was exposed in the writings of
Nietzsche. The Germans had received modern ways and thought later
than the French or the English and therefore in a form more explicitly
divided from the traditional thought. In their philosophy these mod-
ern assumptions are most uncompromisingly brought into the light of
day. Nietzsche's writings may be singled out as a Rubicon, because
more than a hundred years ago he laid down with incomparable lucid-
ity that which is now publicly open: what is given about the whole in
technological science cannot be thought together with what is given us
concerning justice and truth, reverence and beauty, from our tradi-
tion. He does not turn his ridicule primarily against what has been
handed to us in Christian revelation and ancient philosophy. What was
given there has simply been killed as given, and all that we need to
114 Politics and Morality

understand is why it was once thought alive. His greatest ridicule is

reserved for those who want to maintain a content to 'justice' and
'truth' and 'goodness' out of the corpse that they helped to make a
corpse. These are the intellectual democrats who adopt modern
thought while picking and choosing among the ethical 'norms' from a
dead past. Justice as equality and fairness is that bit of Christian
instinct which survives the death of God. As he puts it: The masses
blink and say: "We are all equal. - Man is but man, before God - we are
all equal." Before God! But now this God has died.'
Particularly since Hume, the English moralists had pointed out that
moral rules were useful conventions, but had also assumed that the
core of English justice was convenient. Hume's 'monkish virtues' - the
parts of the tradition which did not suit the new bourgeoisie - could
be shown to be inconvenient; but the heart of the tradition could be
maintained and extended in the interests of property and liberty. It
could be freed from its justification in terms of eternity, and its rigour
could be refurbished by some under the pseudo-eternity of a timeless
social contract. But Nietzsche makes clear that if the 'justice' of liberty
and equality is only conventional, we may find in the course of an ever
changing history that such content is not convenient. He always puts
the word justice' in quotation marks to show that he does not imply its
traditional content, and that its content will vary through the flux of
history. The English moralists had not discovered that realm of beings
we moderns call 'history,' and therefore they did not understand the
dominance of historicism over all other statements. Their social con-
tract was indeed a last effort to avoid that dominance, while they
increasingly accepted the ways of thought that led ineluctably to histor-
icism. The justice of liberty and equality came forth from rationalists
who did not think 'historically.' For whom is such justice convenient
when we know that the old rationalism can no longer be thought as
'true?'
However, it is Kant who is singled out by Nietzsche as the clearest
expression of this secularized Christianity. Kant's thought is the con-
summate expression of wanting it both ways. Having understood what
is told us about nature in our society, and having understood that we
will and make our own history, he turned away from the consequence
of those recognitions by enfolding them in the higher affirmation that

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zamthustra Book, I.v., 'Of the Higher Men,' trans. RJ.
Hollingdale (Midddlesex, U.K.: Penguin 1961), 297.
 Justice and the Right to Life 115

morality is the one fact of reason, and we are commanded to obedi-

ence. According to Nietzsche, he limited autonomy by obedience.
Because this comfortable anaesthetizing from the full consequences of
the modern was carried out so brilliantly in the critical system,
Nietzsche calls Kant 'the great delayer.' Kant persuaded generations of
intellectuals to the happy conclusion that they could keep both the
assumptions of technological secularism and the absolutes of the old
morality. He allowed them the comfort of continuing to live in the civ-
ilizational contradiction of accepting both the will to make one's own
life and the old content of justice. He delayed them from knowing that
there are no moral facts, but only the moral interpretation of facts,
and that these interpretations can be explained as arising from the his-
torical vicissitudes of the instincts. Moral interpretations are what we
call our 'values,' and these are what our wills impose upon the facts.
Because of the brilliance of Kant's delaying tactics, men were held
from seeing that justice as equality was a secularized survival of an
archaic Christianity, and the absolute commands were simply the man-
made 'values' of an era we have transcended.
Nietzsche was the first to make clear the argument that there is no
reason to continue to live in that civilizational contradiction. Societies
will always need legal systems - call them systems of justice' if you like
the word. Once we have recognized what we can now will to create
through our technology, why should we limit such creation by basing
our systems of justice' on presuppositions which have been shown to
be archaic by the very coming to be of technology? As we move into a
society where we will be able to shape not only non-human nature but
humanity itself, why should we limit that shaping by doctrines of equal
rights which come out of a world view that 'history' has swept away?
Does not the production of quality of life require a legal system which
gives new range to the rights of the creative and the dynamic? Why
should that range be limited by the rights of the weak, the uncreative,
and the immature? Why should the liberation of women to quality of
life be limited by restraints on abortion, particularly when we know
that the foetuses are only the product of necessity and chance? Once
we have recognized 'history' as the imposing of our wills on an acci-
dental world, does not justice' take on a new content?1
Against this attack on our 'values,' our liberalism so belongs to the
flesh and bones of our institutions that it cannot be threatened by
something as remote as ontological questioning. The explicit state-
ments of the American constitution guard their system of justice; the
116 Politics and Morality

British constitution guards the same shape of rights in a less explicit

but in a more deeply rooted way. These living forces of allegiance pro-
tect the common sense of practical men against the follies of ideo-
logues. Anyway, did not the English-speaking peoples win the wars
against the Germans, and win them in the name of liberalism, against
the very 'philosophy' that is said to assail that liberalism?
It is also argued that the very greatness of American pluralism,
founded upon the contract, is that out of it have come forth continu-
ous religious revivals which produce that moral sustenance necessary
to the justice of their society. Is it not a reason for confidence that in
the election of 1976 the two candidates competed in allegiance to the
traditions of religion, and that there is a renewed interest in religion
among the young in the contractual society? Where is the atheism of
the right in the United States? Does not the greatness of the American
constitution lie in the fact that the general outlines of social coopera-
tion are laid down and maintained by a secular contract, while within
those general rules the resources of religious faith can flourish, as long
as such faiths do not transgress that general outline? The greatness of
the system is that the tolerance of pluralism is combined with the
strength of religion. God has not died, as European intellectuals
believed; it is just that our differing apprehensions of deity require that
the rules of the game are defined in terms of the calculation of worldly
self-interest; beyond that, citizens may seek the eternal as they see fit.
Indeed, any sane individual must be glad that we face the unique
event of technology within a long legal and political tradition founded
on the conception of justice as requiring liberty and equality. When we
compare what is happening to multitudes in Asia who live the event of
technology from out of ancient and great traditions, but without a com-
parable sense of individual right, we may count ourselves fortunate to
live within our tradition. Asian people often have great advantages over
us in the continuing strength of rite; our advantage is in the continuing
strength of right. Also, our liberalism came from the meeting of Chris-
tian tradition with an early form of modern thought, so that our very
unthinking confidence in that liberalism has often saved us from mod-
ern political plagues which have been devastating in other societies. At
the practical level it is imprudent indeed to speak against the principles,
if not the details, of those legal institutions which guard our justice.2
Nevertheless, it must be stated that our justice now moves to a low-
ered content of equal liberty. The chief cause of this is that our justice
is being played out within a destiny more comprehensive than itself. A
 Justice and the Right to Life 117

quick name for this is 'technology.' I mean by that word the endeavour
which summons forth everything (both human and non-human) to
give its reason, and through the summoning forth of those reasons
turns the world into potential raw material, at the disposal of our
'creative' wills. The definition is circular in the sense that what is 'cre-
atively' willed is further expansion of that union of knowing and mak-
ing given in the linguistic union of 'techne' and 'logos.' Similar but
cruder: it has been said that communism and contractual capitalism
are predicates of the subject technology. They are ways in which our
more comprehensive destiny is lived out. But clearly that technological
destiny has its own dynamic conveniences, which easily sweep away our
tradition of justice, if the latter gets in the way. The 'creative' in their
corporations have been told for many generations that justice is only a
convenience. In carrying out the dynamic convenience of technology,
why should they not seek a 'justice' which is congruent with those con-
veniences, and gradually sacrifice the principles of liberty and equality
when they conflict with the greater conveniences? What is it about
other human beings that should stand in the way of such convenience?
The tendency of the majority to get together to insist on a contract
guaranteeing justice to them against the 'creative' strong continues
indeed to have some limiting power. Its power is, however, itself lim-
ited by the fact that the majority of that majority see in the very techno-
logical endeavour the hope for their realization of 'the primary
goods,' and therefore will often not stand up for the traditional justice
when it is inconvenient to that technological endeavour. The majority
of the acquiescent think they need the organizers to provide 'the pri-
mary goods' more than they need justice.
In such a situation, equality in 'primary goods' for a majority in the
heartlands of the empire is likely; but it will be an equality which
excludes liberal justice for those who are inconvenient to the 'cre-
ative.' It will exclude liberal justice from those who are too weak to
enforce contracts - the imprisoned, the mentally unstable, the
unborn, the aged, the defeated, and sometimes even the morally
unconforming. The price for large-scale equality under the direction
of the 'creative' will be injustice for the very weak. It will be a kind of
massive 'equality' in 'primary goods,' outside a concern for justice. As
Huey Long put it: 'When fascism comes to America, it will come in
*

H.P. Long (1893-1935), Louisiana governor and U.S. senator, who in 1934 seized almost
dictatorial powers in his home state. He was assassinated the next year.
118 Politics and Morality

the name of democracy.' We move to such a friendly and smooth-faced

organization that it will not be recognized for what it is. This lack of
recognition is seen clearly when the president of France says he is
working for 'an advanced liberal society,'just as he is pushing forward
laws for the mass destruction of the unborn. What he must mean by
liberal is the society organized for the human conveniences which fit
the conveniences of technology.
As justice is conceived as the external convenience of contract, it
obviously has less and less to do with the good ordering of the inward
life. Among the majority in North America, inward life, then, comes to
be ordered around the pursuit of 'primary goods,' and/or is taken in
terms of a loose popular Freudianism, mediated to the masses by the
vast array of social technicians. But it is dangerous to mock socially the
fact of contradiction. The modern account of 'the self is at one with
the Nietzschean account. This unity was explicitly avowed by Freud.
With its affirmation of the instrumentality of reason, how can it result
in a conception of 'justice' similar to that of our tradition? In such a sit-
uation, the majorities in the heartlands of the empires may be able to
insist on certain external equalities. But as justice is conceived as
founded upon contract, and as having nothing to do with the harmony
of the inward life, will it be able to sustain the inconveniences of public
liberty?
In the Western tradition it was believed that the acting out of justice
in human relationships was the essential way in which human beings
are opened to eternity. Inward and outward justice were considered to
be mutually interdependent, in the sense that the inward openness to
eternity depended on just practice, and just practice depended on that
inward openness to eternity. When public justice is conceived as con-
ventional and contractual, the division between inward and outward is
so widened as to prevent any such mutual interdependence. Both
openness to eternity and practical justice are weakened in that separa-
tion. A.N. Whitehead's shallow dictum that religion is what we do with
our solitude aptly expresses that modern separation. It is a destructive
half-truth because it makes our solitude narcissistic, and blunts our
cutting edge in public justice.
Above all, we do not correctly envisage what is happening when we
take our situation simply as new practical difficulties for liberalism,

A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947), British mathematician and philosopher and co-author

with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica (1910-13).
 Justice and the Right to Life 119

arising from the need to control new technologies, themselves exter-

nal to that liberalism. Such an understanding of our situation prevents
us from becoming aware that our contractual liberalism is not inde-
pendent of the assumptions of technology in any way that allows it to
be the means of transcending those technologies. Our situation is
rather that the assumptions underlying contractual liberalism and
underlying technology both come from the same matrix of modern
thought, from which can arise no reason why the justice of liberty is
due to all human beings, irrespective of convenience. Insofar as the
contemporary systems of liberal practice hold onto the content of free
and equal justice, it is because they still rely on older sources which are
more and more made unthinkable in the very realization of technol-
ogy. When contractual liberals hold within their thought remnants of
secularized Christianity or Judaism, these remnants, if made conscious,
must be known as unthinkable in terms of what is given in the modern.
How, in modern thought, can we find positive answers to the ques-
tions: (i) what is it about human beings that makes liberty and equality
their due? (ii) why is justice what we are fitted for, when it is not conve-
nient? Why is it our good? The inability of contractual liberals (or
indeed marxists) to answer these questions is the terrifying darkness
which has fallen upon modern justice.
Therefore, to those of us who for varying reasons cannot but trust
the lineaments of liberal justice, and who somehow have been told that
some such justice is due to all human beings and that its living out is,
above all, what we are fitted for - to those of such trust comes the call
from that darkness to understand how justice can be thought together
with what has been discovered of truth in the coming to be of technol-
ogy. The great theoretical achievements of the modern era have been
quantum physics, the biology of evolutionism, and modern logic. (All
other modern theoretical claims, particularly those in the human sci-
ences, remain as no more than provisional, or even can be known as
simply expressions of that oblivion of eternity which has characterized
the coming to be of technology.) These are the undoubtable core of
truth which has come out of technology, and they cry out to be
thought in harmony with the conception of justice as what we are
fitted for.
The danger of this darkness is easily belittled by our impoverished
use of the word 'thought.' This word is generally used as if it meant an
activity necessary to scientists when they come up against a difficulty in
their research, or some vague unease beyond calculation when we
120 Politics and Morality

worry about our existence. Thought is steadfast attention to the whole.

The darkness is fearful, because what is at stake is whether anything is
good. In the pretechnological era, the central Western account of jus-
tice clarified the claim that justice is what we are fitted for. It clarified
why justice is to render each human being their due, and why what was
due to all human beings was 'beyond all bargains and without an alter-
native.' That account of justice was written down most carefully and
most beautifully in The Republic of Plato. For those of us who are Chris-
tians, the substance of our belief is that the perfect living out of that
justice is unfolded in the Gospels. Why the darkness which enshrouds
justice is so dense - even for those who think that what is given in The
Republic concerning good stands forth as true - is because that truth
cannot be thought in unity with what is given in modern science con-
cerning necessity and chance. The darkness is not simply the obscurity
of living by that account of justice in the practical tumult of the tech-
nological society. Nor is it the impossibility of that account coming to
terms with much of the folly of modernity, e.g. the belief that there is a
division between 'facts' and 'values'; nor the difficulty of thinking its
truth in the presence of historicism. Rather, it is that this account has
not been thought in unity with the greatest theoretical enterprises of
the modern world. This is a great darkness, because it appears certain
that rational beings cannot get out of the darkness by accepting either
truth and rejecting the other. It is folly simply to return to the ancient
account of justice as if the discoveries of the modern science of nature
had not been made. It is folly to take the ancient account of justice as
simply of antiquarian interest, because without any knowledge of jus-
tice as what we are fitted for, we will move into the future with a 'jus-
tice' which is terrifying in its potentialities for mad inhumanity of
action. The purpose of this writing has been to show the truth of the
second of these propositions. In the darkness one should not return as
if the discoveries of modern science had not taken place; nor should
one give up the question of what it means to say that justice is what we
are fitted for; and yet who has been able to think the two together? For
those of us who are lucky enough to know that we have been told that
justice is what we are fitted for, this is not a practical darkness, but sim-
ply a theoretical one. For those who do not believe that they have been
so told it is both a practical and theoretical darkness which leads to an
ever greater oblivion of eternity.
In the task of lightening the darkness which surrounds justice in our
era, we of the English-speaking world have one advantage and one
 Justice and the Right to Life 121

great disadvantage. The advantage is practical: the old and settled

legal institutions which still bring forth loyalty from many of the best
practical people. The disadvantage is that we have been so long disin-
terested or even contemptuous of that very thought about the whole
which is now required. No other great Western tradition has shown
such lack of interest in thought, and in the institutions necessary to its
possibility. We now pay the price for our long tradition of taking the
goods of practical confidence and competence as self-sufficiently the
highest goods. In what is left of those secular institutions which should
serve the purpose of sustaining such thought - that is, our current
institutions of higher learning - there is little encouragement to what
might transcend the technically competent, and what is called 'philos-
ophy' is generally little more than analytical competence. Analytical
logistics plus historicist scholarship plus even rigorous science do not
when added up equal philosophy. When added together they are not
capable of producing that thought which is required if justice is to be
taken out of the darkness which surrounds it in the technological era.
This lack of tradition of thought is one reason why it is improbable
that the transcendence of justice over technology will be lived among
English-speaking people.

NOTES

1 To put the matter politically: the early public atheism of Europe generally
came from 'the left.' Its adherents attacked the traditional religion while
taking for granted almost unconsciously that 'the right' would continue to
live with its religious allegiances. 'The left' could attack religion partially
because it relied on 'the right' having some restraint because of its religion.
Philosophers cannot be subsumed under their political effects, but with
Nietzsche the atheism of 'the right' enters the Western scene. One defini-
tion of national socialism is a strange union of the atheism of'the right' and
of the left.'
2 It is well to remember that the greatest contemporary philosopher, Heideg-
ger, published in 1953 An Introduction to Metaphysics in which he wrote of
National Socialism: 'The inner truth and greatness of this movement
(namely the encounter between global technology and modern man).' One
theoretical part of that encounter was the development of a new jurispru-
dence, which explicitly distinguished itself from our jurisprudence of rights,
because the latter belonged to an era of plutocratic democracy which
122 Politics and Morality

needed to be transcended in that encounter. Such arguments must make

one extremely careful of the ontological questioning of our jurisprudence,
even in its barest contractual form.

CANADA AND QUEBEC

In 1976 Rene Levesque led his separatist Parti Quebecois to power in the Quebec
provincial election, a victory that represented the greatest threat yet to the sur-
vival of the Canadian state. Grant often spoke out publicly in the next few years
in an attempt to moderate English-speaking Canadians' response to the hopes
and fears of their French-speaking compatriots.

I saw a map (Europe &) the world from the U.S.A. - black for fascism, white for
democracy. Quebec was grey.
- George Grant to Maude Grant, 1937

We drove into Magog through the wonderful township country with the hills
all around. Glorious countryside in the two essentials: it is lived in, fertile &:
with the mark of man's touch and at the same time it is powerful, strong &
wild. Magog was a typical French town, recently industrialized, enjoying its
Sunday. (The townships that used to be 3/4 English, 1/4 French, are now 80%
French.) We had an ice cream cone & then went to the meeting. The platform
was on the steps of the main RC church with microphones planted in the west
windows & the Bourbon fleur-de-lis & cross everywhere & the tricolor draped
around the front of the platform. The priests looked on (six or eight of them
from the upstairs gallery of the presbytery next door). A large crowd spread
around and out into the street - a crowd of both industrial workers & farmers.
A lovely gay French crowd, with its humour and stupidity, its highly respectable
farm women and its tart like industrial ones. Well, first the candidate from
Montreal-Carder spoke, then Choquette for Stanstead - both dull and short.
Then Barre^ ... spoke as you would never hear (or at least rarely hear in

J.-A. Choquette (1905—?), president of the Union catholique des cultivateurs, elected to
the House of Commons in the Stanstead by-election of 9 August 1943 for the Bloc Pop-
ulaire Canadien.
Laurent Barre (1886—1964), farmer and politician, first president of the L'Union
catholique des cultivateurs (1924).
 Canada and Quebec 123

English Canada) with humour, wit at first, then gradually bringing it all up to a
climax - far better than we can do. Then, suddenly, in the middle of one of his
rising polemics, a honking of horns £ in an open car - the old man [Henri
Bourassa] arrived. Against all my judgment it was the most moving moment I
have ever had in Canada. The first feeling of being a Canadian since returning
from England. He stepped from the car - the old man helped along by a
young man. HisfineGallic face - white beard - and the crowd - not very
excited up to that - going wild - & wild with a feeling that this was their man Be
they really loved him. He walked down the centre aisle - shaking hands with an
elderly cultivateur here & another one there - and as he reached the platform
they sang (£ mind you everybody sang O Canada, deeply moved). Compared
to the fat King or the pompous Bennett,' this really was a man. He was not only
a leader of a party - who had kept power, to whom power was real. This man
had an idea. A bad idea, a pernicious idea, but at least an idea. He was some-
thing in the realm of morality, not merely a man whose end was office. Woods-
worth+ was the only other Canadian who has ever given me that feeling & these
people believed in him. He represented in some basic way the aristocrat of
'leur pays.'
A young man got up to introduce him. Here was a danger. A young fellow
called Laurendeau, editor of Action Catholique, bitter, Catholic, the real fascist,
evidently the brains behind the Bloc. Far too urban, too smooth, too passionate
without solidity, for the agricultural audience. Obviously deeply moved at the
last meeting of the grand old man of their movement.
Then Bourassa. Again wild cheers. An old man's voice - 'Je viens de la cama-
raderie de vous voir'"' - tired, but what a show - up and down the platform -
gesticulating - and humour. Magnificent entertainment. King being seduced
by the Queen - feeding her cognac, but being duped. ' Je respecte le roi - mais
le roi du Canada - pas le roi d'Angleterre.' The Queen departs bored stiff
with poor old King a real royalist, etc., etc. King is only an expert on farming

Henri Bourassa (1868-1952), nationalist Quebec politician and founder of Le Devoir.

R.B. Bennett (1870-1947), Conservative prime minister from 1930 to 1935.
J.S. Woodsworth (1874—1942), clergyman, social worker, and leader of the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation (precursor of the New Democratic Party) from its founding
in 1932 until his death.
J.-E.-A. Laurendeau (1912-68) became provincial leader of the Bloc Populaire in Febru-
ary 1944 and was elected to the Quebec assembly. In 1963 Lester Pearson appointed him
as co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.
"l come to see you out of friendship.
I respect the king, but the king of Canada, not the king of England.
124 Politics and Morality

with the sheep he has in Parliament, [illegible] wild, great cheers, the biggest of
the afternoon other than Bourassa's arrival. Then 'ce brave Paulliot' - what
scorn. Then back to King. He had a grandfather, I had one - 'Louis Joseph
Papineau' - wild cheers. King has deserted his grandfather. I have remained
loyal to mine. Foreign policy, for years dictated by G.B., 'mais maintenant plus
servant a Washington.'' (Solitary cheers from George Grant.) King going to
London via Washington, to Washington via London, but [pour] le Canada
jamais etc., etc. Then suddenly and very effectively from melodramatic humour
and exaggeration to dramatic seriousness - quietly and with terrific force, 'I
have never lied to my people.' Wild cheers. We must look to our rights - we
must be Canadians etc., etc.
Then, he sits down amid prolonged applause - we left hastily.
I think because this particularly county is 40% English they stressed the
Canadian nationalism rather than the French-Canadian. But what impressed
me most-this was a show - a mixture of festival in honour of the great man and
a circus for entertainment. This was alive, real, vital. Whatever party wants to get
anywhere in Quebec, it seems to me, must put on such a show. Thirdly, where
the CCF were allowed to rent the RC parish hall for their candidate, who is the
RC mayor of Magog, these people had the steps of the church with micro-
phones from inside.
- George Grant to Maude Grant, summer 1943

I simply do not get near what is happening in Canada at the moment. Living
in a vulgar Americanized institution I have some sympathy for nationalism in
Quebec, but the more one watches the new government it seems to want to
just produce further modern vulgarity, but just speaking French. I was in
Montreal for a couple of days after Xmas staying with some priests. They are
rather vague nationalists, but the impression I got above all was that they were
just living their lives (men of between sixty and forty) with little sense of the
continuance of their order when they are gone. At the best one could say that
after the quiet revolution they were reculer pour mieux sauter/ but they
seemed to be reculering for ten years and with little sense of what went
beyond.
- George Grant to Derek Bedson, January 1977

L.J. Papineau (1786-1871) was leader of the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada against the
British. Mackenzie King's grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie (1795—1861), led the
rebellion in Upper Canada.
But now more subservient to Washington.
Drawing back in order to jump better.
 Canada and Quebec 125

On National Unity* (1977)

I am honoured to be asked to say a few words at this gathering.

Canadian politics has had two main questions: (i) how to maintain
some independence while sharing this continent with the most power-
ful modern empire; (ii) how to maintain workable relations between
the French and English-speaking communities. Those two very com-
plex questions can only be thought about clearly if they are thought
about together.
This country was made up of two founding groups who weren't very
friendly to each other, but who made a contract because they thought
such a contract would help each of them achieve their own particular
ends - but they were different purposes.
The present constitutional crisis has arisen because some of the
Quebec elite has received the backing of many voters, particularly
young voters, under the affirmation that that contract does not serve
their purposes and therefore must be terminated or perhaps clarified.
What is the proper response of English-speaking people to such an
event? I am sure that it shouldn't be what has been all too common
since that election. Namely - let's see how we can get those people
back into line. Namely — we've got a clever fellow up there in Ottawa
who promised us in 1968 that he could keep them in line and who was
willing to use troops in 1970, and used those troops while most of
English-speaking Canada cheered.
Rather than that approach, I think our constitutional crisis should
lead us to three steps:
(i) to try and understand clearly why these people are saying that the
contract does not work;
(ii) to think clearly — above all, do we really want a country on the
northern half of this continent?
(iii) If we answer that question honestly in the affirmative, how can
we reach a revised contract that will suit them and us?
Let me emphasize that if we really aren't interested in having a
country, there is little point in trying to reach a renewed contract.
Why isn't the contract working in the mind of many French people?
Let me take just one issue - language. Up until recently the French
did not go in for concentrated technological education but continued

George Grant and Maurice Lamontagne, On National Unity (Cemasco Management for
Constellation Life Assurance Gompany of Canada 1977).
126 Politics and Morality

Catholic education. (I do not say that as a sneer, for as a fellow Chris-

tian I have a great sympathy for Catholic education.)
Now that they are with technological education, they find the follow-
ing:
(i) they are behind;
(ii) the universal language of the most powerful technology is
English;
(iii) the only choice they have for control over the technological life
of their country is to hold onto French as the language of that country.
Why?
(iv) their language is the only advantage they have in trying to
redress the balance of what has been English-speaking control of their
technology;
(v) that advantage might give them ten years to catch up in techno-
logical education. - I know the people around Dr Laurin and know
that that is what they are thinking. Nobody in English-speaking Can-
ada ever seems to say this or even understand this.
Do we have sympathy to allow them to use that one advantage to
redress the balance of technological education or do we say we are sim-
ply the instruments of institutional business and we are going to pre-
vent them taking advantage of that advantage?
For that is clearly one thing that they have said to us unambiguously.
They say: the federal government has been keeping Canada's prosper-
ity going - by selling our natural resources cheaply and piling up an
enormous indebtedness in the international community. (Just look
at the rate of growth of our international indebtedness since the
Trudeau government came to office.) What the P.Q. government
seems to be saying is that they will take charge of selling our resources,
James Bay,' etc., because the federal government has not made a very
good job of it. Is that so different from Premier Lougheed+ - who
seems to me a very sensible man?
What I fear from my own community is that we will see the present
crisis in the following way: We will assert that we all believe in the
future of our country and that all we have to do is to struggle for the

Dr Camilla Laurin (1922- ), psychiatrist and Parti Quebecois cabinet minister.

A major hydroelectric project, much of whose output was destined for sale to the United
States.
Peter Lougheed (1928- ), Conservative premier of Alberta, 1970-85.
 Canada and Quebec 127

hearts and minds of Quebec. I don't think you come to sensible con-
tracts from out of such self-delusion.
The first priority for English-speaking Canadians is to think what we
want, and first in that is to think whether we want to be a country in
the northern half of this continent and what we need to do if we want
to continue as such a country.
(Let me say forcibly in parenthesis that I do not think that the only
difficulty here is the business community, for scientists and other aca-
demicians have been just as equivocal in their relation to their country
as have some business people. Universities in English-speaking Canada
have increasingly tried to model themselves on Michigan State or Cal.
Tech. or Yale with little sense of the responsibility to anything unique
this country has to offer.)
I just do not know what the consensus of English-speaking Canadi-
ans will be to this question. Do we care to contract to be a country in
the light of this constitutional crisis?
I do know that if English-speaking Canadians do have enough sense
of wanting to be a country - then we have to get down to reaching a
contract with Quebec in which what both parties need can be put
together.
In that process what will be required above all will be moderation. I
do not mean by moderation - weakness. Moderation is clear firmness.
It is the opposite of intemperance and confrontation.
Let me give you an example of how intemperance fails: The federal
government and its leaders at several TV reported meetings went in for
confrontation with premiers Daniel Johnson and Bertrand of Que-
bec. They made a lot of political capital out of these confrontations
with these moderate nationalists. In November 1976 the sons^ of both
premiers, Johnson and Bertrand, were elected as Parti Quebecois
members. I think that is a lesson about confrontation that needs to
sink it.
Moderation is not only needed from our political leaders - but from
the rest of us. I admire the Globe and Mail, but when its chief corre-
spondent in Quebec heads its lead story with the words: 'Premier
Levesque from his bunker in Quebec City' - my heart sinks. The

Jean-Jacques Bertrand (1916-73) succeeded Johnson as Union Nationale leader and

premier until his defeat in 1970 at the hands of Robert Bourassa's Liberals.
Pierre-Marc Johnson led the Parti Quebecois from 1985 until 1987 and was premier in
1985. Jean-Francois Bertrand was elected in 1976 and was a member of the Parti Quebe-
cois cabinet from 1978 to 1985.
128 Politics and Morality

leader of a few million French surrounded by 250 million English-

speaking people - identified by the bunker with a maniac!
I am more hopeful about moderation since reading the recent
paper on language from the federal government, although my hope is
modified by the fact that this government has been one of confronta-
tion in the last ten years and has not succeeded by these means.
I am also hopeful about moderation because I think both the people
of Quebec and indeed even Premier Levesque are not ideological sepa-
ratists. I think he wants to achieve certain purposes and if some of
these purposes are achievable within a new contract, I think he would
go for such a contract.
In short, if you want this country, I can see no alternative to the pro-
cedures of clear moderation. I am not always optimistic that we will fol-
low such a course for to put it plainly the twentieth century has not
been exactly a moderate century and there are many people around
including important ones who may find that they have much to gain
personally and immediately by being immoderate.

CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

Grant respected the political and juridical achievements of nineteenth-century

liberalism, which he considered a highly practical, though not necessarily philo-
sophical, achievement. However, he considered these achievements under threat
in the late twentieth century because the institutions that had arisen in liberal
societies did not have adequate philosophic grounding. Some of the blame for
that inadequacy, Grant thought, lay with John Stuart Mill, liberalism's most
influential Victorian expositor.

It was not easy for me to leave the Canadian academic establishment and it was
not easy to face the intolerance of that establishment - particularly as that
intolerance claimed for itself the name of 'liberalism.' I think the most savage
words ever spoken to me by an older man I had respected were said by W.A.
Mackintosh and I identified his opinions with your own. For an ambitious per-
son such as myself, it is easier to take such remarks today when one is secure

W.A. Mackintosh (1895-1970), professor of economics at Queen's University and civil

servant.
 Classical Liberalism 129

than at the time they were made, when I was without a job. When English-
speaking liberalism seemed to have the world at its feet in the 1950s, it was not
tolerant of anything which lay outside its vision and nowhere was it more intol-
erant than in its academic manifestations.
- George Grant to J.A. Corry, 17 February 1972

John Stuart Mill (1977)*

It is appropriate that the University of Toronto should be issuing the

definitive edition of the collected works of John Stuart Mill. The for-
mative ideas of that university in its heyday were essentially Millian. In
his introduction to these volumes, Professor A. Brady points out again
and again that Mill was a 'rationalist.' What he is saying is that Mill's
account of 'reason' is the same as that which dominated the University
of Toronto. That is what 'rationalist' is. Indeed, university life in Can-
ada, before the American invasion of the sixties, was largely congruent
with Mill, the archetypal British bourgeois philosopher. This was true,
not only of our intellectual life, but of our politics. Just think of people
like Mackenzie King, L.B. Pearson,' O.D. Skelton+ - progress as tech-
nology, liberty as individualism and property ...
These two volumes (XVIII and XIX) are made up of Mill's writings
on politics and society, except for his Principles of Political Economy
which is in a separate volume. The two central pieces are his long essay
On Liberty (1859) and his book Considerations On Representative Govern-
ment (1861) - the most influential writings about politics coming from
Britain at the height of its power in the nineteenth century. Many
other shorter pieces are made easily available in these volumes. Above
all, it is good to find Mill's two long essays on De Tocqueville on Democ-
racy in America. Here is Mill coming to terms with a great writer of his
age. At a time when those of us of British tradition are called on to
reassess our past, it is useful to have the writings of its most influential

George Grant, review of John Stuart Mill: The Collected Works, vols. 18 and 19, ed. J.M. Rob-
son (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Globe and Mail, 6 August 1977, 31.
L.B. Pearson (1897-1972), deputy minister of external affairs, 1946; secretary of state
for external affairs, 1948-57; winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1957; leader of the Lib-
eral Party from 1958 and prime minister from 1963 to 1968.
O.D. Skelton (1878-1941), Queen's political scientist and under-secretary of state for
external affairs from 1925 until his death.
130 Politics and Morality

secular expositor laid before us in such clear and handsome form. Pro-
fessor J.M. Robson is to be congratulated as the chief textual editor of
this collected edition. All the labour of presenting the works efficiently
and accurately has been well done. The volumes have been completely
and pleasantly printed by the U of T Press. They are not expensive,
considering the price of things these days.
It is all too easy for a person of my temperament, thought, and con-
victions to describe J.S. Mill as a figure of high comedy. Through the
decades from 1830 to 1870 he lectured the English people on how they
must improve themselves. This is, of course, a very familiar role for
'intellectuals' in a society with Protestant traditions, and would not
alone make Mill a figure suitable to the talents of Aristophanes or Jane
Austen. Rather, it is that he dons the robes of justice, while at the same
time his account of the whole leaves no reason why anybody should
take seriously an appeal to justice. The mantle of the tireless preacher
is worn without any seeming recognition that if what he is preaching is
taken seriously there is no reason why it is good to be just. Mill is
indeed the very archetype of the secularized Protestant. He wants it
both ways. He is part of the long tradition of English empiricism, and
affirms that pleasant life in space and time is what matters; at the same
time he affirms a call to justice as right, which comes forth from the
very Protestantism which he rejects theoretically. Indeed, in his
attempt to have it both ways, he decently tried to improve the utilitari-
anism of Bentham and his father, in which he had been educated.
In their utilitarianism, happiness meant the sum of pleasures, and
pleasures were to be calculated quantitatively. Although the anointed
successor of this doctrine, Mill cannot quite accept it, because to him
some pleasures are to be encouraged in society, while others discour-
aged. He therefore introduces into his utilitarianism the doctrine of
higher and lower pleasure. But by wanting at the same time both a
teaching about higher and lower pleasures and his empiricism, he
becomes inconsistent. He is too secularist to give up utilitarianism; he
is too Protestant to give up higher pleasures. The comedy is for a phi-
losopher to sacrifice consistency to decency. He continually inveighs
against the reactionary results stemming from the dogmatic religion of
his country (that is, Protestantism), while his intuitive and imaginative
responses are tied to the very religion he inveighs against. The ped-
antry of his expository style combines the exhortations of the pulpit
with the flat substance of secularism, so that he achieves the very diffi-
 Classical Liberalism 131

cult result of making de Tocqueville appear a bore. Indeed, the com-

edy appears not only from his thought but from his life.
Here is a man who affirms that the purpose of life is maximizing
pleasure, and yet may never have achieved intercourse in his long years
with Harriet Taylor. Marriage blanc is a strange enough conception
even within the more austere reaches of Christianity and Judaism, but
it is even stranger in a man who lectured his compatriots on maximiz-
ing pleasure.
Nevertheless, to approach Mill as a figure of comedy is worse than
inadequate, it is intellectually irresponsible. Here is a man who articu-
lated the political thinking of the dominant class of the dominant soci-
ety of his era, and at a time when that class stood at the height of its
world influence. One is not implying the truth of Hegelianism, if one
states that the philosophy of a world historical class must be looked at
with high seriousness. By seriousness I mean that one must first look
for what is true in such an articulation. Any class which has been
greatly influential in the world has incorporated some aspect of politi-
cal truth in the formulation of its mission. A century before Mill, that
shrewd political philosopher, Montesquieu, had said that the highest
regimes of the Western world had been the Athenian and the English.
The modern was higher than the ancient, because the English had
wisely substituted the pursuit of commerce for the pursuit of honour
as the pulsating heart of their constitutional regimes. The pursuit of
commerce was the best foundation of a free political order.
It may be that the earlier voices of English secular liberalism, Locke
in particular, were more comprehensive, more consistent, subtler than
Mill in formulating the principles of the regimes that Montesquieu so
praised. But in Mill the articulation comes forth when this class was
fully realizing its destiny, and it includes the idea of progress in a way
that Locke did not. Therefore, one must try to look at what is being
said of truth in Mill's thought. Moreover, whatever needs to be
thought about the inadequacy of bourgeois liberty, the regimes that
have blossomed as later forms of modernity, for example communist
and nationalist socialist regimes, have been so much worse than the
plutocratic democracies that one cannot but look with some sympathy
at Mill's articulations. Whatever barrenness there was among the bour-

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), a French nobleman and social critic whose Democracy
in America is considered a classic liberal analysis of American society.
132 Politics and Morality

geois English in such forms of activity as music and contemplation,

politically they have been the best that modernity has to offer.
Indeed, for those of us who live in English-speaking regimes, there is
a particular need to think about Mill's principles. Despite the disinte-
grations and contradictions of our regimes, liberal principles are the
only political principles we've got. What other principles could possi-
bly give more cogency to our processes than something quite close to
what Mill is talking about?
And beyond the practical, it is true that 'the owl of Minerva only
begins to stretch its wings in the dusk.' If our dusk is the twilight of our
liberal regimes then the stretching of any remaining philosophical
wings must include letting those principles lie before us.
In his essay On Liberty Mill states clearly the central affirmation
of all modern liberal regimes:

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled
to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the
way of compulsion and control, whether the means used by physical
force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public
opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are war-
ranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of
action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose
for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civi-
lized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

To many of the best people in our society that principle is funda-

mental to our politics, and so self-evidently true that it is outside
thought — the foundation stone of liberal regimes. What is necessary is
not to think about it, but to see how it can best be implemented in full
recognition of the difficulties in advanced technological societies. It is
so self-evident that to think about its truth is a silly waste of time, wor-
thy of irresponsible professors who should be kept busy with some pro-
ductive research. Yet the passion of astonishment perhaps cannot
finally be destroyed even in America. To let this principle lie before
one and ponder its truth is first to ask what is being said in it about
human beings. Why are human beings such as to merit regimes of free-
dom? It was indeed these kinds of questions that Mill did not ask,
largely it seems because his confidence in his world excluded him
from the passion of astonishment. He could combine his secularism
with his care for the rights of the individual without being astonished
 Conservatism 133

at that combination. In our era, however, when the individual is so ter-

ribly threatened (literally torn from the mother's womb), that combi-
nation appears more astonishing. The questions of the fundamental
principles of a decent regime arise in a more primal way than they
could for Mill.
One is grateful that the University of Toronto is bringing out the
texts of a significant ancestor. Scholarship is not thought and indeed is
generally in our current multiversities the enemy of thought, because
it is used as a substitute. But scholarship can sometimes be a propae-
deutic to thinking. If these volumes lead some people to think about
the fundamental propositions of our secular liberalism, they will have
been worth producing.

CONSERVATISM

John Diefenbaker remained in Parliament for sixteen years after his defeat in
1963. In spite of Grant's criticisms of Diefenbaker's administration, Grant was
seen by the media as one ofttiefew Canadians academics who had anything at
all good to say about the former prime minister. When Diefenbaker died, in 1979
Grant was asked to write this brief assessment. He found Diefenbaker pro-
foundly flawed as a politician and statesman, but he still admired the prairie
politician's great political courage.

I have never felt such political loyalty as I feel for Green and Dief. Whatever the
PM lacks, he spoke unequivocally for Canadian independence. When Mac-
millan purred while he was being raped; Dief. fought. And of course Green has
deeply cared for the most important political cause of all - disarmament - and
has been willing to risk the wrath of big business on this issue. Whatever Dief s
failings, he has in the clinch spoken for Canada. All this leads me to loyalty to
the Conservatives.
- George Grant to Derek Bedson, 1962 1

I feel such a debt to the Conservatives for sticking up for Canada's indepen-
dence. Whatever else Dief has done - this has been fine. So many people
around here just talk as if Canadian independence was a romantic notion from
the past.
- George Grant to Derek Bedson, 1 October 1963
134 Politics and Morality

A Democrat in Theory and in Soul (1979)*

Why did so many Canadians love John Diefenbaker? Watching his

funeral on television, I had to ask myself why I should feel such affec-
tion for him, such a sense of debt for what he represented.
The trust of his countrymen had enabled him to break the long
smooth reign of the Liberals from 1935 to 1957 and had been the basis
of the enormous electoral victory of 1958. In those elections he had
the full weight of the powerful classes against him (including its mem-
bers in his own party) and was still able almost single-handed to pre-
vent the Liberals from forming majority governments. This was
probably his most remarkable political achievement, and certainly a
mark of the affection he could summon forth.
This affection was not something shared by the clever or the rich or
the slick of our society. When he was in power they feared him because
he might take Canada off the smooth course they had charted since
1935; when he was out of office they despised him as a silly survivor
from a well-forgotten past who did not know the score.
A young scion of great wealth in English-speaking Montreal said in
1965: 'Oh George, how can you support such a vulgarian? Pearson is
such a gentleman compared to that yahoo.' The remark illustrated
what the definition of gentleman had become in our society.
Of course, there was something in what the rich and the clever said
about Diefenbaker. His rhetoric was indeed antediluvian; his egocen-
tricity often seemed to transcend his principles. He often sounded the
note of messianism without content. Above all his appalling choice of
French colleagues suggested that he did not know the first principle of
Canadian politics: no party can properly rule in Canada for long with-
out solid support in Quebec. Why then did he continue to summon up
such affection from so many Canadians?
The first fact of Diefenbaker's greatness was that he reached that
part of our population which feels excluded from politics. There are
about 25 per cent of our population who think of politics as some-
thing carried on by 'them' for 'their' benefit. (Perhaps in a technolog-
ical era this percentage will grow, particularly among the dispossessed
young.)
In some mysterious fashion Diefenbaker reached those excluded

George Grant, 'Diefenbaker: A Democrat in Theory and in Soul,' Globe and Mail,
23 August 1979, 7.
 Conservatism 135

and inarticulate people and persuaded them that he was on their side.
What was surprising to political analysts was that he did this as leader
of the Conservatives when socialists were not able to achieve that iden-
tification. He did this despite the formality of his dress and manners in
public. He still wore Homburg hats and elegantly formal suits. I sup-
pose he did it finally because he really did care for all kinds of people
in their authentic individuality. The excluded and the inarticulate rec-
ognized this and responded. He was indeed an honest politician; he
was a democrat not only in theory but in his soul.
Diefenbaker's principles were grounded in primary loyalties, and
loyalty is the great virtue for political leaders. That it is a virtue is often
denied in modern political thinking. Intellectuals are apt to believe
that leaders should have well thought out 'philosophies,' which have
arisen by putting all primary loyalties in question. But this is nonsense
for the following reason. The virtues necessary for the political life are
not altogether the same as those necessary for the contemplative life.
The latter requires that one be open to everything, and this includes
putting everything in question.
In the practical life one is continually faced with making moral deci-
sions, and in doing so one must not put one's fundamental principles
in question, because that only leads to callous opportunism. Diefen-
baker's strength was that his fundamental principles were loyalties
which he did not put in question. He did not debate his beliefs in free-
dom within the law, patriotism, social egalitarianism. He just lived
them out as best he could. People therefore knew where they stood
with him and loved him for it.
In the fast changing world of calculation, 'loyalty' is often consid-
ered outdated and useless for administration. It is therefore becoming
a rare virtue in our society. But people were wise to recognize it in
Diefenbaker and knew they could rely on him.
Diefenbaker's loyalties came straight out of our particular Canadian
tradition. Take his populism as an example. It has been said that Dief-
enbaker was simply a Canadian William Jennings Bryan, with his
appeal to 'the people' against the big interests in the east. But that
misses the distinctly Canadian flavour of Dief's populism. It misses the
fact that he combined his populism with the British tradition of the
primacy and nobility of law.

WJ. Brvan (1860-1925), Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908,
Bryan was a populist politician known affectionately as 'The Great Commoner.'
136 Politics and Morality

In the opening of the west, individuals went first in the United States
and made their own law. In Canada, the federal Government went
before the immigrants, and the immigrants inherited a tradition of
law. Diefenbaker was part of our tradition. He advocated populism, he
believed in the rights of individuals, but always within the primacy of
law. This was why he gave such strong loyalty to the crown and to Par-
liament. Like Macdonald he did not see our democracy as a pale imita-
tor of the American, but as something richer, because it understood
better the dependence of freedom upon law.
Diefenbaker's nationalism was not ideological; he just took it for
granted. It was something given -just as parents are given, both for
good and for ill. Because it was not something he constructed as he
went along, it had real bite. After all, the nuclear arms crisis of 1963
was the first time since 1935 that a Canadian government really
offended the Government of the United States so that it directly
entered Canadian politics. (The next time could be if a Canadian gov-
ernment were to find itself forced over energy.)
But Diefenbaker was speaking honestly when he said T am pro-
Canadian, not anti-American.' He was much too aware of what a dan-
gerous and complex world it is to be ideologically anti-American. He
was much too rooted in everyday life, in Prince Albert and Ottawa, not
to belong to the continent we share with the Americans. He just
assumed that Canada is our own, and that the United States is not. He
assumed that if we have any pride in our own we must be in some sense
sovereign.
When John F. Kennedy told Diefenbaker in Ottawa that Canada
could not sell wheat to China - and he meant 'could not' quite
literally - Diefenbaker replied: 'You aren't in Massachusetts now Mr
President.' He was expressing that Canadians must take for granted
their sovereignty or else have no pride. This was of course a much
less worldly-wise assumption than Pearson's recognition that we are
finally part of the American empire. Nevertheless, it is a necessary
basis if we mean anything more than rhetoric about Canada being our
country.
Because Diefenbaker's nationalism was a given loyalty, it often
showed inadequacies when he tried to express it in office. He was not
able to formulate feasible policies necessary to that nationalism in a
technological era. But to be fair to him: Who since his day has been
able to formulate such feasible policies? Even the wisest patriot of this
 Conservatism 137

era, de Gaulle, was not able to prevent France from being integrated
into the homogenized modern culture.
The great criticism of Diefenbaker was always that he was 'out of
date.' In his last years when he had become a respected elder states-
man, no longer to be feared, this criticism became a kind of patroniz-
ing of him as a fine old dear who was really irrelevant. I always found it
unpleasant that Trudeau used to patronize him from this superior
standpoint.
But what does 'out of date' mean? It is the language of those who
think that our humanity can be made totally intelligible in terms of
such concepts as 'progress,' 'history,' 'evolution.' What such words
generally come down to in practice is that anything that is technologi-
cally and administratively necessary is also good. This expresses that
oblivion of eternity which now defines the West.
But Diefenbaker's loyalties were not defined within such a context
of calculation. Indeed, it is not surprising that his greatest political
humiliation should have been arranged by a public relations executive
- the very type of job which incarnates the absoluteness of calculation.
This is why Diefenbaker was so loved by many of my generation -
particularly by those of us less clever and less successful. Despite all his
bombast, all his egocentricity, all the wild failures of his judgment,
one sensed in him a hold on certain principles which cannot be 'out
of date' because their truth does not depend upon dates. Despite his
almost juvenile engrossment in the day to day excitement of the politi-
cal scene, one sensed some deep hold on certain good things that do
not change. About such good things there has to be calculation, but
their essence is beyond all bargaining. It is to be hoped that the politi-
cal scene will continue to allow such men to be produced.
The cadence of Milton's poetry is not the greatest in the English lan-
guage, but it is very good. It can catch the rhetoric, the tensions and
the nobilities of the battling Baptist lawyer from the prairies.

Among the innumerable false, unmoved,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.

Not everybody is false in the modern world, but there are great
pressures on all of us in that direction. At the political level Diefen-
baker was always a lesson. Whatever else he may have been, he was not
false.
138 Politics and Morality

BRITISH CONSERVATISM

Sir John A. Macdonald had built Canada, in Grant's view, under the inspira-
tion of the conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli, the great mid-Victorian British
Conservative prime minister. Disraeli's Conservative Party stood for modera-
tion, fairness, and good, sense, and these were the virtues, as Grant had
explained in The Empire: Yes or No? that distinguished Canada from the
United States. Yet, however admirable Disraeli's conservatism may have been,
Grant thought that it lacked the strength to withstand the new combination of
liberalism and technology that was becoming the sole public value.

Gladstone & Disraeli were titans, absolute titans. I started with a great bias for
Gladstone, but now I have absolutely no idea whom I prefer. I read four of Dis-
raeli's novels and one of his political writings; the great life (abridged slightly)
by Monypenny & Buckle. I think for a while Disraeli was the great Victorian
statesman and Gladstone the highly limited and bigoted politician. Then I read
something about Gladstone and I say he was the colossus, he was the great
statesman who dominated England with supreme greatness; then I think Dis-
raeli was a crafty opportunist politician. What giants they were. Colossuses. I
practically burst into tears when I read the story of Bismarck at the Congress of
Berlin in 1878 and he turned to someone and said, 'Der alte Jude, der ist der
Mann.'t A superb story.
But then the polemic of Gladstone on ideals and Armenian massacres. Ideals
rather than necessity and selfishness in foreign policy. Ireland and his con-
science. Power and the Midlothian campaign.
Then Disraeli laughs (oh so humanly) at the utilitarians who tried to form
society around a formula, a principle. Philanthropic Disraeli.
- George Grant to Maude Grant, spring 1938

Benjamin Disraeli (1982)+

First, a word of high congratulations is in order. The editors have done

a magnificent job, searching diligently to make this collection as corn-

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, author of Conningsby, Contraini

Fleming, Lothair, and Sybil, or the Two Nations.
'What a man the old Jew is.'
George Grant, review of Benjamin Disraeli: The Early Letters, ed. J.A.W. Gunn et al., Globe
flndMrti/,8Mayl982,E15.
 British Conservatism 139

plete as seems possible, and then laying the letters before the reader
with all the aids of scholarly clarity so that they are a delight to read.
The University of Toronto Press has produced beautiful books at a rea-
sonable price for these expensive days. This is scholarship at its best.
When one thinks that these two volumes only take Disraeli up to his
entrance into Parliament in 1837, and that the great man goes on until
1881, what a treat awaits us. These volumes are not only useful for peo-
ple who want to study the nineteenth-century European world profes-
sionally, they will be a delight for anybody who wants to contemplate
the life of a great political leader.
Politics is, as Plato showed, the royal art. In the golden afternoon of
England's authority as the first of the industrialized nations, she was
fortunate to have such outstanding practitioners of that art as William
Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. When one compares their level of
education and character with that of the people who run our societies
today (Canada included), one may have a word to say for aristocracy as
against the undiluted triumph of capitalist democracy. For my part, I
put Gladstone slightly higher because he had the perspicacity to try to
limit English imperialism at the height of its power.
But Disraeli was also a splendid politician. Even more than Peel, he
was the founder of the modern Tory Party, and through all the cata-
clysms and aberrations of the modern era, that party more often than
not has stood for good sense. That is a lot to say of any institution. To
take a small influence: one cannot understand the conservatism of
Canada (Macdonald, Whitney, Borden, Ferguson, Bennett, Diefen-
baker) without thinking of Disraeli. This may be a tradition that has
decayed in Canada before the ravages of capitalist liberalism, but it was
a great part of this country. Another Canadian connection in these vol-
umes is that there is a nasty picture of Lord Durham, whose report did
much harm in Canada by failing to recognize the French for what they
were. These two volumes only take us through the early years, culmi-
nating in the disappointment of the unfair failure of his maiden
speech in Parliament. A sweet letter from his school in Blackheath is
followed by accounts to his sister of trips around Europe and the
Levant. These are followed by letters in which he tries to establish him-
self in the literary and political scene of the New World that is coming
forth after the Reform Act of 1832. He has difficulties with his publish-
ers, he has continued failures at the polls, but he never flags in his
determination to establish himself in the ruling class. Why shouldn't
he? Neurotic ambition can be a corrupting vice, but Disraeli's ambi-
140 Politics and Morality

don seems singularly free of the neurotic. He just wants to get on and
achieve what he knows himself capable of, in a country which he thor-
oughly likes. Compared to Gladstone again, he does not start with an
established position. He has to make his place in the world and he
does so in a direct and healthy way.
What comes forth from these letters is a very worldly human being.
By worldly, I do not mean a non-religious man. He seems to take reli-
gion for granted, as something quite given in the nature of things and
to be properly respected. What I mean is that he likes the riches of
experience. This comes out in his long letters from abroad. He
describes what he has been doing and seeing with external gusto -
often in a way that may bore us moderns who are more used to subjec-
tive analysis. But this love of the surface and of the immediate is the
mark of his health. Many successful politicians are often neurotic inso-
far as they pursue power to assuage their subjectivity, but the best poli-
ticians are those who like the world. One trusts Disraeli because his
shrewd and interested acceptance means that he is not a hater. It
seems natural that he should be the fellow countryman and near con-
temporary of the delightful and insightful Jane Austen.
One particular mark of his health is how much Disraeli loved
women. I do not mean by this that he was in pursuit of the continual
Giovannian orgasm which in our age is often implied when one says
that somebody loves women; such pursuit is for much less sane human
beings than Disraeli. What I mean is that he writes to all kinds of
women with a delicious interest in their doings and his own. Some of
the best letters in the first of these volumes are to his sister Sarah (he
addresses her sweetly as Sa), and there is a halcyon quality about their
obvious mutual affection. Clearly from the later letters, he used his aris-
tocratic mistress Lady Sykes to advance his career, but there is no sign
that there was anything particularly nasty in this. It is often said that Dis-
raeli manipulated Queen Victoria for his own purposes. We will obvi-
ously have to wait for the later letters to see whether this was the case.
But from these letters, I doubt whether manipulation is the right
word. Interest in and understanding of other people is the basis of inti-
macy. Disraeli had interest and understanding for many ladies, from
his grandmother to his sister and a wide variety of intelligent and aris-
tocratic women. To take that as manipulation is to miss the point that
he had empathy for their worlds. To state the obvious: it is surprising
to consider how few human beings really like the members of the
opposite sex.
 Liberalism and Tyranny 141

Yet it must be insisted that these volumes depend on what lies

ahead. Nobody would be publishing these letters if they were not a
preparation for what is going to happen in the future. They are of
interest because they come from the young man who will try in 1878 to
prevent Europe from tearing itself apart in war. Perhaps one begins to
see in this loving and ambitious young man the later man to whom Bis-
marck would pay his great compliment. Perhaps one begins to see why
a great aristocrat, Lord Salisbury, given above all to the defence of the
Church of England, would work so happily as his second in command.
Shrewd men are often not likeable; likeable men are often not
shrewd. As a young man, Disraeli is obviously both. Above all, he has
loyalties (not principles) which quite transcend his own ambitions. He
loves his country, the landed aristocrats, and his family. Loyalties
rather than principles are the mark of the conservative. This is one rea-
son indeed why conservatism is so difficult in a technological age. It
cannot be said too often that fast technological change goes with fast
moral and religious change. Disraeli's loyalties were strong enough to
see him through.
I await with eagerness the volumes which follow when he becomes a
great practitioner of the royal art.

LIBERALISM AND TYRANNY

When the Canadian Supreme Court struck down Canada's law governing abor-
tion, Grant concluded that another step had been taken in the decay of the lib-
eral tradition of justice. He began increasingly to fear that the universal and
homogeneous state was approaching more quickly than he had previously
thought. Normally he was an advocate of moderation in politics, but in this
selection Grant's anger flames forth as he compares the philosophical basis for
the pro-choice movement to the essential element that drove the Nazis. However,
there is little doubt that Grant genuinely believed that the coming technological
state would be a tyranny.

We have just had a Supreme Court decision here on abortion. The majority
was, if possible, worse than Roe v. Wade but luckily we've a health care system
where the money comes from the federal government but where administra-
tion is in the hands of the province. Some of the provinces have refused to
142 Politics and Morality

allow their hospitals to finance non-medical abortions. But you can imagine
how the press is attacking them as 'rednecks' etc., etc. What is so extraordinary
about our politics is that some of the left-wing politicians who speak most often
about rights are just those who speak most loudly in favour of abortion on
demand.
- George Grant to David Bovenizer, 6 March 1988

The Triumph of the Will (1988)

The decision of the Supreme Court concerning abortion could be

seen as comedy - if it did not concern the slaughter of the young. Any
laughter is quelled by a sense of desolation for our country. Yet the
comedy too must be looked at to understand our political institutions.
The comedy arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used
the language of North American liberalism to say 'yes' to the very core
of fascist thought - the triumph of the will. Their decision is a good
example of Huey Long's wise dictum: 'When fascism comes to Amer-
ica it will come in the name of democracy.' The court says yes to those
who claim the right to mastery over their bodies, even if that mastery
includes the killing of other human beings.1
Indeed, the advocates of abortion have shown since the decision
how much they are believers in the triumph of the will, when they
'demand' that the government 'must' immediately guarantee access
and payment for all abortions. That is, the state must pay for these pro-
cesses, even when they are not medically necessary. The triumph of the
will realizes itself when its advocates understand that the individual will
is only liberated to its full power when it can dominate the state.
The imputation of fascism to those with whom one disagrees is
indeed a dangerous game. People of the left call Mrs Thatcher a fas-
cist, when, whatever she may be, she is not that. People of the right call
Castro a 'fascist,' when, whatever he may be, he is not that. To speak of
incipient fascism in the present case requires that one discuss what fas-
cism is. That is a useful public task, because fascism is a growing possi-
bility in advanced industrial countries. If one does not look clearly at
such phenomena, one cannot think how to deal with them.
The English-speaking liberals quite correctly saw the European

George Grant, 'The Triumph of the Will,' in The Issue Is Life: A Christian Response to Abor-
tion in Canada, ed. Denyse O'Leary (Burlington, Ont.: Welsh Publishing, 1988).
 Liberalism and Tyranny 143

examples of fascism as despicable tyrannies. What they could not

express was the difference between such totalitarian tyranny and most
of the tyrannies of the past. The marxists saw clearly the partial truth
that fascism was made possible by a late stage of a decaying capitalism.
They had no explanation for the fact that certain fascists spoke so vio-
lently against Western capitalism. The Americans and the Russians
united to defeat National Socialism in battle. As Stalin so rightly put it:
'The Americans gave money, the British gave time, the Russians gave
blood.' But the defeat in battle has not enabled us to understand what
fascism was. Its core was a belief in the triumph of the will. The result is
that when the triumph of the will manifests itself politically in our soci-
eties, we just cannot know it for what it is.
What is meant by the seemingly simple word 'will?' In the pre-mod-
ern world it had a certain meaning which was particularly emphasized
in Christianity, because the words which were spoken in Gethesemane
- 'Yet not My will but Thine be done' - were paradigmatic for Chris-
tians. It meant appropriate choosing by rational souls. With the com-
ing of modernity, it has come to mean something different. When
'will' is thought modernly it means the resolute mastery of ourselves
and the world. To understand this modern illumination of the word
'will,' it is necessary to put aside entirely that old faculty psychology, in
which will was understood as a power or faculty of the soul, having to
do with free choices. Rather, will is the centre of our aiming or seek-
ing, the holding together of what we want. That greatest modern
defmer of will, Nietzsche, said that everything was 'will to power.' This
has often been misinterpreted by traditionalists as if he was substitut-
ing power for happiness or pleasure, as that which was worth aiming
at. But in the phrase 'will to power,' he is not describing what we aim at
- something outside the will. Rather, he is saying that will is power
itself, not something external to power. What makes Nietzsche such a
pivotal thinker in the West is that he redefined 'will' to make it conso-
nant with modern science. 'Will' comes to mean in modernity that
power over ourselves and everything else which is itself the very
enhancement of life, or, call it if you will, 'quality of life.' Truth,
beauty, and goodness have become simply subservient to it.
How did this new conception of 'will' come to be central in Western
civilization? Obviously, first as science. Modern science is a particular
form of science - that which issues in the conquest of human and non-
human nature. This is why it is right to call Western science 'technolog-
ical science.' Technology produces 'quality of life.' This science under-
144 Politics and Morality

stands nature as outside the idea of purpose. Nature is understood as a

product of necessity and chance - not of purpose. That is, modern sci-
ence laid nature before us as raw material to be used as we dispose.
How then should we dispose? In the early years of our science, Chris-
tian purposes were still operative, and later the purposes of various
kinds of secularized Christianity. (Propriety forbids me a bow to Mme
Justice Wilson for her decision in the present case.) These secularized
Protestant purposes were above all expressed in the English-speaking
world as the greatest happiness of the greatest number through capital-
ist technology. In the marxist world these purposes were expressed
as the building of the classless (and therefore egalitarian) society,
through the communal ownership of the means of production. But
both these ethical systems depended on something outside 'will' itself.
Why should I aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number?
Why should I 'will' the classless society? These aims were outside will
and therefore inhibited enhancement of life by imposing on will aims
from outside will itself. Therefore, the deepest movement of modern
thought was to take the great step that our aim was the power of will
itself. That is what is meant by 'the triumph of the will.'
The Triumph of the Will is, of course, the title of Leni RiefenstahlV
documentary about the National Socialist Party's convention at
Nuremberg, a brilliant title for a brilliant documentary. Is it not
absurd, therefore, to relate the apotheosis of such an occasion to the
freedom of women to have abortions as they deem it desirable? Is it
not particularly absurd when the height of the Nazi occasion is essen-
tially masculine, and women are shown by a woman in the stance of
adulation? Several points, however, need to be made about fascism
(call it, perhaps more accurately, National Socialism).
In the film, Hitler is seen, not as the liberator of his own will, but as
the man who through his own liberation can make possible the libera-
tion of each individual will in his nation. From the moment that he
descends from the skies in his airplane and walks hesitantly forward,
he is the ordinary German who through his own liberation apotheo-
sizes the liberation of all Germans.
It must be remembered that National Socialist doctrine despised the

Bertha Wilson (1923- ),justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1982 to 1995.
Leni Riefenstahl (1902- ), German actress and filmmaker who became notorious for
her Nazi propaganda films, especially The Triumph of the Will (1934), one of the most
powerful propaganda films ever made.
 Liberalism and Tyranny 145

submergence of the individual will in the rationalized collectivism of

communism, as much as it did the impotence of the individual in capi-
talist democracies. The doctrine was that each individual will would
find its liberation in unity within the National Socialist Party. Anything
that was 'given' in a situation, so that it could not be changed, was seen
as an unacceptable limitation on the triumph of the will. The Jewish
community was strong in German-speaking lands. The Jews were
thought of as internationalists and cosmopolitans. Therefore, accord-
ing to the national socialists, they stood in the way of the triumph of
German will. And so these masses of human beings, this given part of
Germany, who stood in the way of what National Socialists considered
to be the quality of German life, had to be exterminated. When the
National Socialists gathered that they were being beaten in war, this
terrible extermination was speeded up in the name of their will's
revenge. Nothing given could stand in its way - even the givenness of
other human beings.
Is it not true, however, that National Socialism is a thing of the past
and therefore pointless to bring into debate about today's issues? It
was a revolting regression from the modern age of reason, a finished
nightmare to be put aside. I am saying something very different.
When one strips away the particularities of the German situation
after the intense defeat of 1918, one finds that that situation was a par-
ticular possibility for the manifestation of the triumph of the will. That
doctrine expresses very closely what human beings think to be true in
modernity, when they seek to express their search for meaning in a
universe which is known as purposeless. This doctrine has therefore
continued to be present in the English-speaking world which has been
dominant since 1945. It has particularly expressed itself in the dealings
of the U.S. with its empire abroad. It was evident in the determination
of the American leaders to have their will by air power right around
the world in Vietnam. It can be seen at home, for example, in the work
of medical research to find means of mastery over the reproduction of
the species.
It is not surprising that leaders of the women's movement, seeking
to overcome the injustices of a long-standing patriarchal tradition,
should express themselves in the modern language of the triumph of
the will. As the presentation of modernity to itself, it is in all of us at
some level explicit. It is to be expected that this language should
become dominant among the leaders of the women's movement,
because thev are so aware what it is to live in modernity.
146 Politics and Morality

Of course, ever since patriarchal society began all women have had
to face the fact that the enjoyment of sexuality left them with the pro-
digious possibility of pregnancy, while men could go forth free from
that enjoyment. Perhaps this was even resented by some women in
matriarchal times, in which the whole society turned on the recogni-
tion of birth as central. (We just do not have the records of matriarchal
society and its overthrowing.) In earlier patriarchal societies, religious
control had some effect sometimes, in forcing men to assume some
responsibility for pregnancy. Where land was the essential cause of
wealth, owner families had a very great interest in forcing men to bear
responsibility.
In modern technological society, most bourgeois women, and those
who wish to become bourgeois, find themselves in a position where at
one and the same time the emancipation of sexual desire is advocated
from the earliest age, and yet where, if they are to be anything socially,
they must go out to work in the world where what matters is the eman-
cipation of greed. This is achieved under corporate capitalism through
mastery over oneself and other people. How can such modern women
put up with unexpected pregnancies (whether within marriage or
without) which can demolish their place in the corporate market and
push back their ambitions in relation to the ambitions of other people
at the same level? Abortion on demand, then, appears a necessity
under the conditions of corporation capitalism, as it presumably also
does under corporation communism. Indeed, women's position as
potential mothers becomes particularly pressing in all advanced indus-
trial societies, because their skilled or unskilled labour, their low or
high ambitions are wanted in the marketplace. This happens at a time
when the overcoming of the unfairness of their sexual position seems
at last possible.
It is no wonder, then, that the leaders of the women's movement
take on the language of the triumph of the will when they are seeking
to get the state to fulfil their purposes, and when they are opposed by
those who must be against abortion on demand for the clearest rea-
sons. The ambiguity is that the famous feminist phrase 'biology is not
destiny' must be true for all Christians, because we have been told that
in Christ there is neither male nor female. At the highest reaches of
human life and love, gender is simply unimportant. The question is, at
what levels of life and love is gender important, and how should that
difference manifest itself?
It is not that the women's leaders say that to be truly free, women
 Liberalism and Tyranny 147

must get rid of their gender. They do not seem to want to build an
entirely androgynous society. It seems rather that, in their desire for
liberation, they want not only to keep their gender, but also to use it as
they will. But their ability to use their gender, and not to be controlled
by it, requires their life and death control over beings other than
themselves. For the 'given' which their wills need to control is those
individual members of their own species within their bodies. 'Other-
ness' which must be dominated has always been that thing in terms of
which the language of the triumph of the will arises. In this case, the
need for liberation arises not against the absence of the vote, or ine-
quality in the marketplace, but against developing infants. This is the
terrible pain which leads certain women to the language of the tri-
umph of the will. They feel trapped by their gender but the means of
liberating themselves from this entrapment must often include killing.
The language of the triumph of the will is a means of escaping from
that trap, because it frees one from the traditional restraints against
killing.
What is saddest for the modern future is that belief in the triumph
of the will seems to bring with it an intensity of propaganda in which
the general public is prepared for the killing which is to ensue. For a
decade the National Socialists had been saving that the Jews were not
truly human, that they were parasites living off the healthy society. It
hardly needs saying that the Jews are as truly human as the rest of us.
Nevertheless, the fact that the opposite was a lie did not prevent its dis-
semination and influence. Those who disseminated it believed it. The
most effective dissemination of lies is by those who believe them. So in
the coming of mass abortion in our society untruths have been spread
by those who do not know they are untruths. Current scientific knowl-
edge tells us that a separate human life is present from conception,
with its own unique genetic pattern, with all the chromosomes and
genes which make it human. It is of the very heart of fascism to think
that what matters is not what is true, but what one holds to be true.
What one holds to be true is important because it can produce that
resolute will tuned to its own triumph.
However, it must be said that where the clarity about truth which
belongs to modern science has allowed us to know what the fetus is in
a matter-of-fact way, more difficult implications arise when modern sci-
ence is used as if it provided the whole truth about life. This has some-
times led to a belittling of human life and to the arising of the doctrine
of the triumph of the will. All this has often been denied or refused by
148 Politics and Morality

advocates of abortion on demand. It has been said that the fetus is a

few cells attached to a woman's body that can be easily clipped away. It
has been said that it is simply a parasite which has attached itself to a
woman's body. Lies have been told or truths neglected to loosen up
people to be prepared to accept the mass feticide which now charac-
terizes our society.
Post-Darwinian biology has set before us an account of all animals
essentially understandable as matter in motion. What is made final for
all animals is that they are driven by the necessities of the struggle for
existence. To say the least, such an account of life makes it problematic
whether there was something about human beings which should make
us hesitant to kill them. National Socialist ideology was impregnated at
its heart with Darwinian biology. In terms of such an account of life,
why should we care about the life of a fetus when it conflicts with the
will of a fully developed woman? But then, of course, we are led inexo-
rably to the next stage. Why should we care about the lives of human
beings outside the womb if they are only an accidental conglomeration
of cells, and if they stand in our way? The science which explains every-
thing in terms of necessity and chance has been the basis of our obvi-
ous progresses, but at the same time its intellectual victory over all
other kinds of thought has left Western human beings questioning
whether their own life has meaning other than in terms of the triumph
of the will.
After the Supreme Court decision, the victorious advocates of abor-
tion on demand paraded with signs, on some of which was the slogan
'Abort God.' They were right to do so. What they meant was 'abort the
idea of God because it has held human beings back from liberation.'
What is given us in the word 'God' is that goodness and purpose are
the source and completion of all that is. Only in terms of that affirma-
tion can we dimly understand why our lives and others' partake in a
meaning which we should not hinder but enhance. It is in the name of
the fact that the human fetus is a member of our species, called to par-
take in meaning, that in the past we have turned away from abortion,
except in extreme cases. All this was affirmed not only in the teachings
of Christians but in the Hindu Vedanta - that greatest Eastern teach-
ing. Those who see life simply as a product of necessity and chance are
inevitably more open to feticide, because they do not see the destiny of
meaning to which human beings are called. This is the prodigious pre-
dicament that the intellectual triumph of modern science has cast
upon us human beings.
 Liberalism and Tyranny 149

To say all this is not to imply that North American society is yet close
to fascism as a form of government. There are many influences in our
society which hold us back from that. Obviously, all sane people hope
that these influences will continue to prevail. What I am implying is
that these influences are fragile in the face of the doctrine of the tri-
umph of the will. Nor am I saying that North American fascism would
be, in outward appearance, much like the National Socialism of
Europe. The trappings of romanticism in North American fascism
would be quite different from the trappings of German romanticism.
It is interesting that, alone among Western countries, West Germany
has a law which gives the fetus a legal right to life, with some condi-
tions. The Constitutional Court says that this is to make plain the Ger-
man historical experience and 'the present spiritual-moral confron-
tation with the previous system of National Socialism.' In 1988 West
Germany has forbidden surrogate motherhood and the production of
human embryos for research. The Germans have the great advantage
over us of already having faced the political incarnation of the triumph
of the will.
I am, however, saying two things: The triumph of the will as an indi-
vidual view of life passes over into politics, and even in government, in
advanced industrial societies, when those societies see themselves as
threatened or fading or even at the point of defeat. It was certainly the
smashing of Germany by the Allied powers in 1918, and the ruthless-
ness of the defeat imposed upon them, which led to fascism in Ger-
many. The unequivocal victory of American capitalism in 1945 meant
that we had no need of fascism. But if in some unpredictable future
the power of American capitalism seems to be fading before the power
of Japan and China, and if the economic powers in America recognize
the consequences of that threat, then very different forms of govern-
ment might arise within the bounds of their democratic constitution.
Secondly, the living forth of the triumph of the will among the stron-
gest advocates of complete liberty for abortion does not imply that
such advocates are in any sense a core for fascist politics. They simply
give us a taste now of what politics will be like when influential groups
in society think meaning is found in getting what they want most
deeply at all costs. They illustrate what pressure this puts upon a legal
system rooted in liberalism, whose leaders have riot been educated in
what that rootedness comprises. Even in its highest ranks the legal sys-
tem in its unthinking liberalism simply flounders in the face of those
who find meaning in the triumph of the will. This has been shown in
150 Politics and Morality

both of the liberally appointed American and Canadian judiciaries.

When society puts power into the hands of the courts, they had better
be educated.2
Fast technological change is always accompanied by fast moral and
religious change. It is good, therefore, for Christians to look clearly at
what the advocates of abortion on demand portend in the way of unre-
strained politics. The politics of the triumph of the will are less and less
controlled by any considerations of reason, let alone by tired liberal
reason which expresses itself only in terms of a contract. However
important these questions about politics, more immediate is the mas-
sive slaughter of the innocent which goes on and on.
(Note: Another long article would be required to spell out the
causes in legal and general education which lead to the jurisprudential
shallowness among the judges. As much as abortion, this question goes
to the very roots of modernity.)

NOTES

1 Note: I do not intend to show in this writing that the fetus is a developing
individual of our species from conception. This was shown beyond doubt in
the testimony of the famous French geneticist, Jerome Lejeune, before a
committee of the American Senate.
2 The more the justices quote philosophy or religious tradition the less they
give the sense they understand what they are dealing with.

FREE TRADE

In 1988 the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney completed a free-trade

agreement with the United States. Although Grant had, with little enthusiasm,
generally supported the Mulroney regime, he was not prepared to accept more
rapid Canadian integration with the United States or the debasement of Cana-
dian culture that free trade seemed to threaten. In the last few months before his
death, this was an issue that more and more attracted his attention.

The sadness of English-speaking nationalism in Canada is that so much of it

wants nationalism, but wants to be the same American capitalism, with a [illeg-
 Free Trade 151

ible] maple leaf flag put on top. You rarely meet people who are outside the
determining power of that American dream. It is for this reason that I detest
[NDP leader Ed] Broadbent's supposed nationalist rhetoric. It is just the Dem-
ocratic Party North. As Mulroney is the Republican Party North.
- George Grant to Gaston Laurion, 21 July 1988

The Fate of the Willing (1988)

This book comprises statements by forty-seven thoughtful Canadians

who oppose the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement. The contributors
vary widely: from Margaret Atwood to Frank Stronach, from David
Suzuki to Peter C. Newman. It is divided into three sections: 'What We
Think,' 'What We Know,' 'What We Feel.' Most of the contributors are
people who believe that free beings ought to be able to decide ratio-
nally what will happen in the world. That is, the good-mannered and
liberal left predominates. Different voices deal with different prob-
lems: many with the economic issues, some with the social, cultural,
and political issues. Taken all in all, this is a powerful statement of
what a turning point the free-trade deal will be in Canadian life, and
why it bodes ill for our nationhood.
Much of the argument deals with the practical issues directly: why
Canada would be better served, for prosperity and independence in a
technological age, by other strategies ... Several of the writings argue
that Canada will be forced to give up social programmes that have
expressed community solidarity. They will have to be given up so that
we can maintain cost-competitiveness with the Americans. Here the
appeal has been strongly made by such labour leaders as Shirley Carr
and Bob White. But I think the best understanding of this matter is
found in Denis Stairs's article. He understands that community
responsibility, and indeed the continuing basis of Canada, has lain in
the primacy of the political in our national life.
He states: 'The treaty is only partly about securing access to the
American market and subjecting Canadian industries to the salutary
cleansing of the cold shower. It is also about "deregulating" Canadian
society - that is, about diminishing (after the American model) the

George Grant, review of Ij You Love This Country: Facts and Feelings on Free Trade, ed. Lau-
rier LaPierre (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987) in Books In Canada vol. 17, no. 1
(January-February 1988). 18-19.
152 Politics and Morality

role of the state in Canadian life.' Or again: 'The fact remains that the
proposed treaty not only embodies but, if implemented, will further
encourage a conception of government and society different from the
one that Canadians currently enjoy. Canada will be a less relaxed, a less
gentle, a less tolerant place in which to live.' He of course realizes that
this is not an absolute difference between Canada and the United
States. I wish he had carried over his splendid argument about the pri-
macy of the political into how the three Canadian parties destroyed
their nationalist wings: the squashing of Walter Gordon by Lester
Pearson when the former annoyed the business community; the
removal of the Waffle^ from the NDP when it angered the unions; the
destruction of Diefenbaker and his followers by Camp+ and the busi-
ness Tories. At the level of the immediate issues, Stairs's statement
about the necessary primacy of the political over the economic should
be central to any argument about free trade.
There is one statement in the book that moves quite outside the
careful assumptions of practical decision. This is Farley Mowat's. He is
not concerned with how we should deal immediately with the Ameri-
cans. He recognizes the arrival of cosy totalitarianism at the centre of
the American empire, and hates it. This is the statement with which I
feel the greatest sympathy. It is not filled with progressive talk about
free human beings being able to make the world as they choose. He
sees what corrupts the possibility of politics at this stage of raging tech-
nological change. His statement just expresses clear hatred. Hatred is
not a typical Canadian emotion or one that Canadians admire - greatly
to their credit. Nevertheless, some things deserve to be hated - the
friendly tyranny of corporation capitalism and the consequent Boden-
losigkeit. (The English word rootlessness catches less well what is happen-
ing than does the German.) Love and hate are necessary to each other
except among the saints.
There is one phrase that recurs in this book that I find unwise: 'Our
two countries.' This is what might be called the rhetoric of Broadbent
- the rhetoric he has used since he was used to drive the nationalists
out of the NDP. But it is also the 'liberal' rhetoric by which American

Walter L. Gordon (1906-87), minister of finance in the liberal government of Lester

Pearson, 1963-5.
A left-wing, nationalist movement within the New Democratic Party, purged from the
Ontario NDP in 1972, it had disintegrated by the mid-1970s.
Dalton L. Camp. (1920-). Conservative Party president 1964-9; in this capacity he was
intrumental in the removal of John Diefenbaker as party leader in 1967.
 Free Trade 153

journalists legitimize themselves to themselves. They proclaim them-

selves a country and eschew the word empire, while their battleships try
to impose their will in the Persian Gulf. I would have wished, in this
book, for a sharper understanding of what imperialism means, and
particularly the workings of capitalist imperialism. This is necessary
even if we are perhaps faced by a fading Western empire. I think there
should have been more understanding in the book of how the central
stage of world history now moves from Europe to Far Asia, as China is
developed with Japan. What does this mean for Canada, living on the
very periphery of that Western empire? In our present case, some of
our shrewder capitalists may be calling for continental solidarity as a
necessity of this situation. Truth cannot be much spoken in the public
realm. Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt [fate leads the willing and
drags the unwilling]. What is great about this book is that its writers are
splendidly stating their unwillingness to be dragged. It is surely a
nobler stance to go down with all flags flying (even our present Cana-
dian one) and all guns blazing than to be acquiescently led, whether
sadly or gladly, into the even greater homogenizing of our country into
the American mass.
This page intentionally left blank
 Part 2
Philosophy and Education
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PHILOSOPHY AND THE PERFECTION OF GOD

Grant was asked to write an essay on the state of philosophy in English-speaking

Canada for the Massey Royal Commission on the Arts, which had been estab-
lished to make recommendations on the state of Canadian culture. Though he
never doubted the truth of his bold assertion in the opening sentence of this essay,
he had cause to regret having written it since it earned him the enmity of many of
the most senior and influential philosophers across the country, not least the for-
midable Fulton Anderson, head of the department ofPhilosoohy at the University
of Toronto.

Philosophy (1951)

The study of philosophy is the analysis of the traditions of our society

and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of
the Perfection of God. It is the contemplation of our own and others'
activity, in the hope that by understanding it better we may make it less
imperfect. At the centre of the traditional faith of the West has been
the understanding that there are two approaches to reality, the con-
templative and the active, and that only in the careful proportioning of
these can individuals and societies find health. The contemplative life,
whether mystical, artistic, or philosophic, has therefore been encour-
aged by societies not only for the good of the contemplative himself but
because its influence upon more active members was considered of
value. Philosophy was therefore encouraged as the rational form of
such contemplation.
Such a definition of philosophy asserts that it is in no sense limited
to being a technical subject confined to specialists in universities. It is
an activity necessary for all sorts and conditions of men - politicians
and saints, artists and businessmen, scientists and farmers - if such

George Grant, 'Philosophy: An Essay Prepared for the Royal Commission on National
Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences 1949-1951' (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier
1951). This material originated in the Privy Council Office and is reproduced with the
permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, 1996.
158 Philosophy and Education

men are to relate their particular functions to the general ends which
society desires.
Philosophy is not, then, confined to a subject found in university cal-
endars. Yet at the same time universities are the focal points upon which
will depend in large measure the state of rational contemplation in the
rest of society. In the universities, society allows scholars the time and
the freedom to contemplate the universe, to partake of the wisdom of
the past, to add their small measure to the understanding of that wis-
dom, and to transmit the great tradition to certain chosen members of
the younger generation. If the universities are not rich in the practice of
philosophy it is unlikely that less favoured parts of the community will
be much touched by it. Therefore, what follows will be concerned with
the teaching and practice of philosophy as it is carried on in our
universities.
In writing of this question it is only realism to pose the problem pes-
simistically. Why do our universities fail in providing a place where
young Canadians are encouraged to think about their world in the
broadest and deepest way? That the universities are not providing such
a place is but to state a truism. Can it be doubted that Canadian univer-
sities today exist essentially as technical schools for the training of spe-
cialists? They turn out doctors and physicists, economists and chemists,
lawyers and social workers, psychologists and agriculturalists, dieticians
and sociologists, and these technicians are not being called upon in any
systematic way to relate their necessary techniques to any broader
whole. Even the traditional humane subjects such as history, the clas-
sics, and European literature are in many cases being taught as tech-
niques by which the students can hope to earn their living, not as useful
introductions to the sweep of our spiritual tradition.
Indeed, behind the character of our classrooms lies the fact that this
production of technicians is being encouraged by the dominant forces
that shape society. The general voting public (that is, the parents of
the young) think of the university as a place where the child can
become a specialist and so equip himself to enter or to remain in the
more economically fortunate part of society. Governments — provincial
and federal - use their influence to see that practical training is
encouraged, so that the society will not be ill-equipped in any neces-
sary technique, whether that technique be appropriate to a university
or not. Anyone who has sat on a faculty of graduate studies knows well
that the ablest students are being encouraged by our government (in
 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 159

that clearest form of encouragement - the financial) to become tech-

nicians. Students who want to become physicists, biochemists etc.
know that if they are at all promising they will receive help from the
National Research Council, the Department of Defence, etc. Students
in such fields also know that there will be lucrative jobs waiting for
them when their studies are finished. On the other hand, those stu-
dents who are studying in the general humane tradition know that
financial help in their fields is small and that jobs will be hard to find
when they are through. Finally, it must be said that the university
authorities themselves do little to control this tendency. In some uni-
versities in English-speaking Canada, there are four times as many peo-
ple teaching physics as teaching philosophy, and three times as many
people teaching animal husbandry.
These general facts about our universities must be mentioned, for it
is clearly impossible for the study of philosophy to flourish in such an
atmosphere. Philosophy is not in essence a technique. Its purpose is to
relate and see in unity all techniques, so that the physicist for instance
can relate his activity to the fact of moral freedom, the economist see
the productive capacity of his nation in relation to the love of God.
The prime reason, no doubt, for this state of affairs in Canada is the
fact of our short history, most of which has been taken up with the prac-
tical business of a pioneering nation. Such a society must put its ener-
gies into those pursuits that will achieve material ends. The active
rather than the contemplative life perforce becomes the ideal. Any-
thing that will effectively overcome hardship must be welcomed with
enthusiasm. That concentration of material ends and admiration for
the man of action continues for a long while after it has ceased to be a
necessity.
In a subtler way our pioneering background has affected our taste for
rational contemplation. A pioneering society in which there are obvi-
ous material accomplishments open to all men of average intelligence
leads to an optimism about the universe much like the optimism asso-
ciated with youth. The tragedy and complexity of maturity are not so
evident as in an ancient and more static society. When the spiritual dif-
ficulties of maturity arise, the cry of 'Go west, young man' can help indi-
viduals to avoid them. It is out of a sense of tragedy and uncertainty
more than anything else that the need for philosophical speculation
arises. A young nation in its sureness and confidence is thus basically
unphilosophical.
160 Philosophy and Education

Yet, lest our short history be used as a sufficient justification of our

lack of interest in the contemplative arts, it is humbling to remember
that two or three generations ago when the country was small and poor,
Canada in proportion to its size was far more ready to support the
'impractical' studies than it is today. Both within the Protestant and
Roman Catholic traditions of English-speaking society the small and
poor community struggled to establish universities in which chairs of
classics, philosophy, and theology were considered the essentials. The
traditions of Christian Europe which the early settlers brought with
them did not allow them to believe that man lives by bread alone, even
when bread was far more scarce than it is today. It is therefore necessary
to look beyond the mere fact of our youth for the causes of the materi-
alist concentration in our universities.
It is but another truism to say that Canada has come to maturity, not
in isolation but as a member of the Western society of nations. Our spir-
itual climate is largely formed by our partaking in the ideas of that civi-
lization, which during the years of Canada's development was being
transformed by the new mass industrialism. With that industrialism
went certain dominant ideas that effected an almost incalculable spiri-
tual change in the West. In the light of the amazing power of science,
men no longer doubted that they could easily perfect their societies. In
the field of knowledge the slogan was 'knowledge for power,' in the
expectation that with such power all would be well. In the field of edu-
cation there arose the egalitarian slogans with their contempt for the
'impractical' and the 'academic.' Men often forgot the need of those
disciplines that once had been considered a potent influence in pre-
venting us from becoming beasts. The more Canada has become part
of the scientific world of the West, the more it has partaken of ideas
such as these, and the tragedy of its youth has been that the bonds of
tradition have been less strong with us than elsewhere. What can the
place of the philosopher be in the mass world, when by definition,
philosophic knowledge is not open to the stereotyped mass, and when
the philosopher cannot believe that salvation is achieved by tech-
niques? What is the role of the philosopher in the universities which
have in general accepted the aspirations of their societies - aspirations
that leave little place for the practice of contemplation?
Tragically, the scandal must be admitted that, with rare exceptions,
philosophers in Western society have joined in the aspirations of the
scientific age. The lie that knowledge exists only to provide power has
 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 161

been as much in the soul of philosophers as in the rest of society. The

chief schools of thought in Canada among energetic philosophers in
the 1920s and 1930s were pragmatism and positivism. What do such
positions mean but that ideas are true insofar as they help men manip-
ulate their natural environment? Along with marxism (on the whole
less potent among Canadian philosophers) they tend towards the posi-
tion that all men's problems may be solved by scientific technique.
Canadian philosophers indeed have joined as fully as any part of the
Western world in making philosophy the servant rather than the judge
of men's scientific abilities. Young Canadians have quite logically
drawn the correct conclusion from such an attitude. If philosophy is
merely the servant of science, then they are better occupied studying
with the master rather than with the servant.
Associated with the philosopher's willingness to make his subject
serve the interest of physical science has been the dream of modern
philosophy - that it might free itself from its traditional dependence
upon the theological dogmas of faith. Canadian philosophers have
shared in this secular hope as deeply as have their fellows in the rest of
the Western world. This hope has been connected intimately with the
gradual secularizing of those universities founded within the Protestant
tradition. Philosophy was thought of as a secular study to suit the mod-
ern world and the secular university. It is not possible here to enter
in any adequate way upon the ancient controversy as to the proper
relation between philosophy and theology- between the discoveries of
reason and the discoveries of faith. Yet it would seem that unless philos-
ophy is to become a purely negative discipline, it must have some kind
of dependence on faith - whatever faith that may be. Reason not
guided by faith cannot but find itself in the position of destroying every-
thing and establishing nothing. And though one of the roles of philos-
ophy must be destructive and critical, if that be its only role it cannot
hope to have any profound or abiding influence on society. Active men
depend upon faith of some sort for their very existence. It is not surpris-
ing that the destructive philosophy that characterized Western univer-
sities after 1914 led students to give up the study of philosophy as
pointless. When philosophers are jejune enough to deny in the name
of secularism and science the possibility of rational faith, then young
men and women in their need of faith will simply bypass the philoso-
phers. Society will suffer the tragedy of men looking for their faiths out-
side the rational discipline that is the function of philosophy to provide
162 Philosophy and Education

in the search for faith. Society suffers the tragedy of their youth finding
faith in such childish hopes as marxism, in such unbalanced cults as the
Jehovah's Witnesses. It would seem clear, then, that only as philosophy
finds its roots in religious faith will it once again have a profound influ-
ence on young Canadians. The teaching of philosophy in our Canadian
universities is not only bound up with the question of what our univer-
sities are to be but also with the larger question of what our churches
are to be.
To face as the primary thesis of this essay that philosophical studies
are in no healthy state in Canada must not prevent mention of the
good things that have been done and are being done. The Roman
Catholic tradition in English-speaking Canada may be mentioned first
because it has always been numerically smaller and because it has main-
tained relatively unbroken its traditional attitude to the role of philo-
sophic speculation. It has always maintained its ancient trust in the
activities of speculative reason for certain carefully chosen of its mem-
bers, so long as that speculation is carried on within the limits of its
closely defined faith. The Roman Catholic colleges and universities
have always insisted that their best pupils go out into the world with
some grounding in the traditions of scholastic philosophy - that is, in
the reasonable framework of the theology of their church. They have
been insistent that the training of rational Roman Catholics was at least
as important as the training of efficient economists or physicists. Often
the technicians have made the claim that students from these universi-
ties have not as adequate a technical knowledge as students trained
elsewhere. The philosopher can but ask whether this lack of technical
width (if it be a fact) is not more than counterbalanced by the other
ends that their education has served.
A notable step in Roman Catholic philosophic activity was the recent
establishment of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. This insti-
tution is connected with St Michael's College and through it to the Uni-
versity of Toronto. It calls together Roman Catholic scholars of the first
magnitude to pursue their studies in the fields of medieval history and
political thought, medieval philosophy and theology. To it come post-
graduate students who can pursue their own studies in this field under
scholars of first-rate calibre. Concentration is laid on the study of St
Thomas Aquinas, so that students have the possibility of mastering
a great system of thought. From such an institution as this, well-
disciplined teachers go back into the undergraduate fields equipped to
 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 163

pass on something of the unity of their particular tradition. Other insti-

tutions have much to learn from places such as this, from which under-
graduate studies receive their life-blood and in which different studies
are so intertwined as to learn the values of each other.
It is more difficult to understand what has been accomplished in phi-
losophy among those institutions that belong to the Protestant tradi-
tion. Protestants, whether in Canada or elsewhere, have been less
certain in their formulation of the relation of philosophy to faith than
have the Roman Catholics. They have never been willing to maintain
such ecclesiastical discipline as could preserve a consistent stand on the
matter. On the one hand, Luther's great affirmation that the Word of
God is sufficient for the Christian has ever made certain branches of
the Protestant church wary of speculation as a pagan activity that adds
nothing to the faith by which men are saved. On the other hand, the
liberal elements that have become increasingly dominant within the
Protestant churches have sought a close alliance between philosophy
and theology so that the church would have a rational apologetic with
which to face the world. Yet again certain secularist elements that have
increasingly sheltered within traditionally Protestant institutions have
gone so far as to seek the freeing of philosophy from any dependence
upon faith, even in those very institutions founded and supported by
men of the Protestant faith. The results of the first and third of these
tendencies have, though contradictory, led in the same direction. Phi-
losophy has been, by and large, taught in the universities of non-Cath-
olic Canada as a secular study not necessarily connected with the
progress of faith. As a result of this anomaly, a subject such as philoso-
phy, which deals with the wholeness of existence, has been in no way
related to the faith from which the universities sprang, and indeed is
sometimes in direct contradiction to that faith. This anomaly has been
left largely undebated both by men who are avowedly Protestants and
by the secularists.
What has happened to the universities and colleges that originally
sprang from the Protestant tradition? Do these universities in any sense
continue to think of themselves as servants of that tradition or do they
think of themselves as secular? Clearly, on the answer to that problem
will depend the character of the philosophy which will develop in our
colleges. This history of Queen's University may be taken as an example
of what is involved in this problem. About half a century ago Queen's
decided to sever its official connection with the Presbyterian Church
164 Philosophy and Education

from which it had sprung. It did this in the hope that it could thereby
play a wider role in the national life. Did the men responsible for this
decision visualize that philosophy would then be taught as a study
unconnected with the faith? In looking at the documents of the time it
is difficult to suppose that the men who advocated this course did so
intend. Yet half a century later the content of the teaching in the Fac-
ulty of Arts at that university is found to be almost entirely secular. The
universities controlled by their respective provincial governments raise
another problem. If to be non-denominational means to be non-reli-
gious, is philosophy (as a general university subject) to be taught as a
secular study?
The churches themselves have a great stake in this question of the
teaching of philosophy. In the past presumably they have thought of
the universities to which they have sent their young members (whether
laymen or incipient members of the clergy) as institutions closely
related to the Church. Yet in the past, the study of philosophy in these
institutions has just as often served as a destroyer of the faith rather
than the creator of the rational groundwork to that faith. It must be
admitted that the Protestant churches have been remarkably uncon-
cerned with a state of affairs which has done much to vitiate their
strength.
Indeed, the prime difficulty in estimating what our philosophic ideas
have been is that Canada during the period that those ideas were form-
ing has witnessed the change among influential sections of the popula-
tion from being Protestants to being secularists. Though this has not
been true of the majority of Canadians, it has been true of a large per-
centage of the intellectually gifted people who shape our society and to
whom reasoning is a possibility. Such a remarkable and deep-seated
change in our national life has naturally confused our philosophizing.
Despite the difficulties of understanding what philosophy has meant
within the Protestant tradition, certain real achievements must be rec-
ognized. These have been generally accomplished by men of Great
Britain, educated in the Christian and classical studies of that country.
Many of these scholars did noble work in revealing the value of such
studies to many generations of Canadians. Two fine examples of this
kind of teaching may be singled out: the work of Professor Watson at

John Watson (1847-1939), Canada's foremost philosopher of his time. He began teach-
ing at Queen's in 1872 and served under Grant's grandfather. Grant was a student at
Queen's when Watson died and he served as a pallbearer at his funeral.
 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 165

Queen's around the turn of the century, and the work of Professor
Brett at Toronto University in the third and fourth decades of this cen-
tury. Because these men had been trained in European philosophy
with its faith in human reason's pursuit of the Good, they could bring a
tradition to Canada far more profound and ordered than the pragma-
tisms which were influencing us from the south. They had been
brought up in societies that had been for centuries Protestant and so
could help keep alive in Canada those ideas out of which the English-
speaking forms of our society had been born.
One difficulty of having Englishmen as our leading teachers of phi-
losophy must, however, be mentioned. As has been said earlier, these
men were teaching at a time when the conception of the contemplative
arts was being radically assailed in Canada. The fact that the men who
were deeply involved in keeping this conception alive were generally
men bred in Great Britain often meant that they were unable to trans-
pose the vital issue of philosophy into sufficiently Canadian terms to
make them of burning interest to young Canadians. This failure
became increasingly important as the forms of life in Canada became
more differentiated from those in Great Britain. To say this is in no
sense to stand on the dogmas of a narrow Canadian nationalism, or to
imply that Canadians have not important things to learn from men
trained in Great Britain. It is, however, to say that a philosophy depart-
ment must not only have the conservative aim of acquainting students
with ideas from our past, but also the prophetic aim of showing what
those ideas mean in our actual present existence. It is certainly true
that in any Canadian department of philosophy there is ample room
for teachers from Europe who will almost certainly understand the past
of Europe better than will Canadians. But their work must be carried
on within a context of Canadian teaching impregnated with our history
and the form of our institutions and ideals. Often in the past, philoso-
phy has seemed a pursuit which turned out cultured Europeans, but
hardly an absolutely necessary activity for Canadians.
During the last years there have appeared the first signs of an indige-
nous Canadian approach to the problem of philosophy. All over the
Western world, the multiplying tragedies that have occurred since 1914
have turned more sensitive minds to a new assessment of human exist-
ence. The dimming of the optimistic hopes that characterized that first

George S. Brett (1879-1944), a classics professor at the University of Toronto who

joined the philosophy department, of which he was chair from 1927 until his death.
166 Philosophy and Education

industrial expansion has led men to seek a faith that has a fuller answer
to the tragedies of experience. In this world there was little need to
speculate deeply. As optimism declines, there is more reason to do so.
The evidence for this new awakening to our problem is indeed hard
to assemble. Yet it is impossible to be with young Canadians and not
feel an eager and questioning curiosity, a dissatisfaction with easy
answers, out of which a truly Canadian philosophy might be born. This
possible awakening is seen at a further level in the scholarly writings
that are appearing. Canadian scholars are beginning to produce works
of a profounder nature than studies of the wheat trade and the devel-
opment of responsible government in Canada. It must be noted that
these new works are not so much coming from men in the philosophy
departments proper as from men whose studies are in one of the spe-
cialized fields. Such studies have led men to understand the limits of
their fields seen in isolation, and so to an attempt to relate that field to
the problem of human existence as a whole. Thus, their thought has
become philosophical. Too often those in the philosophy departments
proper have not been to the same degree challenged by the modern
world so as to face the problems of philosophy in this living way.
The work of the late Professor C.N. Cochrane of Toronto may be
taken as a noble example of this new Canadian interest in the problems
of philosophy at their most profound and necessary level. His magnum
opus, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), shows how interest in a
particular field of human study drives the sensitive thinker out into the
very midst of those spiritual problems that beset the modern world. In
his early writings it is clear that he considered the historian's job was
simply to say what had happened and to leave to other men the deeper
judgments as to the meaning of history. As in most of this scientific
investigation, the values that sustained the society were assumed, by an
implicit faith, to be certain, and therefore not the concern of the
scholar to defend. Yet in Christianity and Classical Culture Cochrane goes
far beyond this 'objective' tradition and raises the profoundest ques-
tions about human destiny. He questions the very possibility of the
aloof scholarship that he had once practised. To read the work is to
understand that the history of the ancient world has been illuminated
for him by the predicaments of his own society, and that he uses the
example of the ancient world to throw his light towards the solution of
the modern predicaments. A work such as Christianity and Classical Cul-

See George Grant, 'Charles Cochrane,' in Part 3.

 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 167

ture is not one to fall under the heading of light reading, even to the
trained mind. It is the kind of work that will not influence large num-
bers at one time, but will influence and continue to influence the few.
Such indeed must always be the role of significant philosophy - to
affect the spirits of the intellectually gifted and through them to filter
down into society as a whole.
One may cite other examples of specialists who in moving beyond
the limits of their techniques see the broader questions of knowledge.
In Professor Frye's recent work on William Blake - Fearful Symmetry -
full recognition is given to the fact that Blake's writing cannot be
understood through the criteria of literary criticisms alone, but must be
judged within the wider reference of the interpretation of experience
that Blake attempts. Thus, his work is not limited in interest to the
scholar of English literature, nor does it merely maintain that a cul-
tured man should be interested in poetry. Rather, through the study of
one poet it raises basic problems about the nature of man with which
all are concerned whether they will it or not. Yet another example is
Professor Woodhouse's Puritanism and Liberty* Even Professor Innis, +
who in his early work rigidly confined himself to technical questions of
economic history, has expanded his recent lectures on Empire and Com-
munications (1950) to relate the questions of economics to their wider
philosophical background.
These examples of Canadian thinkers who have shown themselves
willing to go beyond scholarship to more general questions of human
importance are encouraging to those who would hope for a native tra-
dition of Canadian philosophy. They are signs that Canadians are no
longer willing simply to accept from the more important nations of the
Western world their assumptions about human life. There is the begin-
ning of a recognition by Canadian scholars that we cannot count on
our spiritual tradition remaining alive automatically. There is a realiza-
tion at the intellectual level that Canadians can no longer afford to play

Northrop Frye (1912-91) was a Canadian literary critic who taught at Victoria College at
the University of Toronto and whose work achieved international renown. His first
important book was Fearful Symmetry (1947). See Grant's later review of The Great Code,
Part 4 of this volume.
A.S.P. Woodhouse (1895-1964), head of the department of English at University Col-
lege, Toronto, 1944—64, and author of Puritanism and Liberty (1938).
^Harold Innis (1894-1952), Canadian economist and communications theorist, headed
the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto 1935-52. See Grant's
later discussion of Innis in Part 4 of this volume.
168 Philosophy and Education

the role of debtor nation to the Western tradition, but must play their
part in conserving and enlivening that tradition. Even more so, there is
the understanding - and here the work of Cochrane must be especially
noted - of how much the wisdom of that tradition has already been
trodden under foot in our concentration on developing the mass soci-
ety. Cochrane makes clear that only in realizing how close the intellec-
tual life of Canada has come to losing the wisdom of a pre-scientific age
will the strength and vitality be found to work towards the rediscovery
of such wisdom.
At the more immediate level, these examples of a renewed interest in
philosophical and theological wisdom point to some conclusions as to
how philosophy could better fulfil its unifying role among our various
necessary techniques. First and foremost it lights up the fact that most
of our ablest teachers and students must perforce be technical special-
ists. Those who recognize the need for philosophical studies in Canada
must work within the limits that are imposed by the hard facts of our sit-
uation. To put it historically, it is not possible in Canada to recreate the
medieval idea of the university, or to copy the form of Classical Greats
which held so great an influence over the education of the privileged
classes of Great Britain in the nineteenth century. If philosophic stud-
ies are to be revived, it must be by reviving them among students and
teachers whose first duty is the pursuit of some specialism such as law or
history, economics or medicine. The hope is that specialists may see the
interdependence of their specialty and the general questions of human
existence. This philosophic interest must not be confined to those who
are going to be academic practioners of their specialism, but must
include those students who are to become more active members in
society, whether as judges, doctors, civil servants, or scientists in the
great industries. The tragic split between the men of action and the
men of contemplation must be overcome; the philosophers must rec-
ognize the relation of philosophy to the problem of society, and the
spirit of philosophy must be infused into those who must act. Such an
end is clearly an ideal impossible of achievement but a move towards it
is the only hope of reviving the contemplative life.
At the undergraduate level, something in this direction is already
carried out in most Canadian universities. A majority of students who
are studying for the BA are at one time or another exposed to some
philosophy. To a lesser degree this is true of those working towards a
BSc. Courses in philosophy for engineering and medical students are
becoming more of a commonplace in our calendars. It may be said,
 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 169

however, that often these classes in philosophy serve as a pleasant cul-

tural appendage rather than as something central to the business of liv-
ing. The main difficulty still remains that those students in BA and BSc
courses who are really capable of sustained and systematic thought are
being encouraged to specialize. Our arts faculties are a series of unre-
lated departments, so that the students receive little sense of the unity
of human knowledge. In the sciences this is perhaps understandable; in
the arts it is a tragic disgrace. Our technical tradition in the arts is a nar-
rowing circle. The students we train in that specialist tradition in time
become teachers themselves and thereby further atomize the arts facul-
ties. This narrowing circle is tightened by the fact that professors have a
tendency to compete like prima donnas and to use their influence to
persuade students to specialize with them rather than to help them to
gain a broader education.
The question is, how can the narrowing circle be broken? With the
present state of Canadian universities it does not seem possible that the
return to a more unified conception of education can be achieved by
reforms in our undergraduate arrangements. Rather, our hope must
be to broaden ovir graduate studies so that the graduates thereby pro-
duced may one day be in a position to do something about our under-
graduate teaching. Today it must be recognized that our society and its
universities are so organized as to admit large numbers to higher edu-
cation who are not capable of advanced thought, and that therefore
undergraduate studies must perforce be limited in their scope and
expectations. Those students who have shown themselves able to con-
tinue their studies at the graduate level in a specialized field are just the
members of society who will benefit from the unifying discipline of phi-
losophy. Also, they will be older, and as Plato and Aristotle both point
out, philosophy can best start when men have some experience on
which to philosophize. The chief aim of philosophy in Canada, then,
should be to see that graduate students continue their studies not sim-
ply in an ever narrowing field of specialism but within some kind of
philosophic framework. Nothing else could do more to increase the
strength of the contemplative tradition in Canada. It may be said that if
something were accomplished in this direction the title 'Doctor of Phi-
losophy' might once again signify what it is supposed to signify.
How can something be done towards this end? First is the question of
how those who teach these advanced techniques may be brought to
realize the value of their students beholding their studies within a wide
whole, and may be persviaded to allow them to spend some of their
170 Philosophy and Education

time on work towards this purpose. Secondly, there is the question of

how the general public may come to recognize that this is an end on
which time and money must be spent. In both cases it is only sensible to
admit that any movement away from our present situation will be slow.
A change in the attitude of society seems improbable unless the first
move be made by the university authorities - both the teachers and the
boards of governors. So often our university authorities have seen
themselves as the servants rather than the teachers of the public. They
have given way to the pressures of popularity. If the universities give a
lead in this matter, they must be willing to pay the price of such a lead.
The price in a democratic and industrial society such as ours will be the
accusation of being 'academic' and 'impractical.' Also, it may be said
that the lead must probably come from the wealthier universities in the
larger centres who are more able for financial reasons to resist outside
clamours.
One step would be a change in the curriculum of our graduate
schools, so that advanced degrees would not be granted unless the stu-
dent shows some grip of the tradition. This would require some real
philosophic study. Since the curriculum of the graduate schools is in
the hands of the academic personnel, a change in this direction would
be an immediate possibility. How can the PhD have any meaning as a
degree, or any right to its title, if it be granted to students who are not
required to show any formal understanding of the relation of their sub-
ject to the questions of human existence as a whole? Toronto University
does something in this direction. However, when one reads technical
theses which have been accepted for the doctorate at that university,
and which are devoid of the primary element of philosophic thought,
one can only be dubious of what is being accomplished. It has often
been the way of modern men to laugh at the medieval student for dis-
cussing how many angels could stand on the point of a needle. Our
modern laughter must be humbled by reading theses on the excreta of
rats for which PhDs have been awarded.
The concern of the governors of our universities is the sheerly quan-
titative question of number of teachers. Most philosophy departments
are now staffed as if philosophy were one of the less important tech-
niques taught at the university. If it is to be more than that, if its role is
to provide some unity between various studies, then the governors must
be willing to spend enough money to make this possible. Sheer quan-
tity of teachers will by itself achieve nothing. It is nevertheless a sine qua
non. A tradition of rational speculation is not something that a society
 Philosophy and the Perfection of God 171

can buy cheaply - a pleasant extra that coats the real business of
improving the standard of living.
More important than sheer numbers are the subtler questions of
what kind of teachers one wants and how they may best be trained. The
teachers of philosophy, if they are to have influence, must be men who
are not only steeped in the wisdom of the past but who are also aware of
society as it is. Above all, they must be aware of the meaning of the var-
ious other studies in the university. Only in this way can they fulfil their
special responsibility for making clear to the university community that
their subject is not another specialism but related to all studies. Noth-
ing has done the practice of philosophy more harm than the idea of
some scientists that philosophy is another science of the same kind as
theirs. The narrow vocabulary and approach of certain philosophers
has been largely responsible for that illusion. Therefore, our teachers
must be men able to expose that illusion by teaching philosophy in a
broad and living way.
A chief step, then, must be in the setting up of graduate schools in
which this narrow approach to philosophy can be broken down. Here
the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies must once more be referred
to. For all institutions now existing in Canada, it seems to point most
surely in the right direction. There one sees a graduate institution
which approaches the activities of the human spirit in a unified way,
and all in relation to a particular tradition. Philosophy is not seen as an
isolated technique but as something related to the other facets of the
Catholic life - history and theology, art and liturgy. To repeat, the stu-
dents from such an institution have a wholeness about their attitude to
learning not found among many of the students who have done their
work in the atomized graduate schools of our country.
Immediately the question arises about the cost of establishing such
institutions. One advantage of the Roman Catholic Church over others
is the economic saving of a celibate priesthood. But the cost in other
traditions should not be prohibitive, especially when it is compared to
the money spent on the researches of physical science. The enormous
money spent on guaranteeing the physical health of our society would
not be necessary in establishing institutions such as these which would
guard our spiritual health. The question is simply whether a society
gains more from its M.I.T.s or from its Institutes of Medieval Studies.
The difficulty immediately arises of whether these institutions in
non-Roman Catholic education should be secular or professedly Chris-
tian. This, however, need not be a difficulty. Those universities which
172 Philosophy and Education

now admit they are simply secularist will probably be quite content with
their graduate schools as they already are. If not, they could set up Insti-
tutes of Humane Study or some such title. Protestant universities or col-
leges that maintain their Christian affiliations could set up schools for
Christian study very much like the Institute for Medieval Studies. From
what has been said earlier there can be no doubt which of these two
types of institutions the present writer would expect to be the more
effective. The dependence of philosophy upon theology makes such a
conclusion necessary. From such institutions a start might be made in
seeing that our spiritual traditions were once more in close relation to
the life of actions. Thence would come the vitality which might recreate
our universities into what they should always have been - centres of
rational thought about the universe.
Inevitably in such a young country as Canada, one must write about
the teaching of philosophy in the spirit of things hoped for, not in the
pride of what has been accomplished. Upon what is likely to be accom-
plished, it would be folly to speculate. As in all the slow intangible
accomplishments of the human spirit, its quality will depend on
whether men look for the long-term or the short-term results. In the
short view, the advantages are clearly with the continued production of
technicians by our higher education. The question will be decided by
whether our political leaders and civil servants, our businessmen and
educators come to see more clearly the long-term advantages of train-
ing our able youth in a contemplative as well as an active approach to
life. It will depend indeed on whether they see the incalculable advan-
tages that will pertain to any society which has a contemplative tradition
strong enough to act as a brake on the rightly impetuous men of action.
In the world we live in, the need of such an influence should become
increasingly apparent.
The tragedy must be admitted that, just as the controlling forces in
our Western world are beginning to understand how deeply our spiri-
tual traditions need guarding, and that some of our energy must be
diverted from technology towards that purpose, our society is being
challenged to defend itself against a barbaric empire that puts faith in
salvation by the machine. This must inevitably mean that a large per-
centage of Western wealth be spent on the mechanism of defence.
As this essay is addressed to a Royal Commission, something must be
said in closing of how interdependent is the progress of philosophy
with the progress of the arts. The practice and enjoyment of the arts has
only flourished in the past among men who have had some understand-
 The Role of Education 173

ing of the wholeness of life, and who therefore could see the true pur-
poses of art in relation to the other necessary activities of human
existence. A supreme artist such as J.S. Bach could use the techniques
of his craft to the full because he understood the purpose of his art
within the wider range of human function. Equally, the community for
which Bach wrote could appreciate his music because they had some
vision of what music meant in the total progress of the human soul. Phi-
losophy cannot produce that intuition of the beautiful out of which art
arises, but it can help to promote that unity of mind in which such intu-
ition will best flourish. The same may be said of letters. Though it is sug-
gested in this essay that applied science is already overdeveloped in
Canada, philosophy can give that unity of mind out of which the spec-
ulations of pure science arise. The development of the philosophical
disciplines in our universities would provide the kind of integrated
minds among educated Canadians through which the arts of civiliza-
tion could flourish in some balanced proportion.
In closing, the present writer has no alternative but to repeat once
again his conviction that the practice of philosophy (and for that mat-
ter, all the arts of civilization) will depend on a prior condition -
namely the intensity and concentration of our faith in God. It is a
great illusion that scepticism breeds thought and that doubt is the
producer of art. The sceptic fails in that courage which alone can but-
tress the tiring discipline of being rational. Why should those who
believe there is so little to know spend their energy in the hard activity
of contemplation? As the late A.N. Whitehead wrote, it is in the ages
of faith that men pursue truth and beauty. It would be impudence
indeed in this essay to suggest how and when we Canadians will reach
a fuller and more balanced intuition of God. It is not impudence,
however, to point out that without such faith it will be vain to expect
any great flowering of our culture in general and of our philosophy in
particular.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION

Ever since working with the Canadian Association of Adult Education from
1943 to 1945, Grant was passionately interested in education. He rarely
declined an opportunity to speak to teachers' groups and he constantly reminded
174 Philosophy and Education

them of the dangers of losing sight of the fundamental truths that gave teaching
its importance.

You mentioned before I went to the 'old country' that I might look around
for somebody (preferably Scottish) to help teach philosophy. I came across
nobody who seemed suitable. Indeed the more I saw of young European philos-
ophers the more I wondered how they would understand and fit into the Nova
Scotian pattern. Science is so objective and certain that the background of the
teacher is not of its essence. Philosophy because it deals with such personal mys-
teries does depend on the teacher understanding and sympathizing with the
background of his pupils. So many of the young English and Scottish teachers
I have met were able, but I doubted their ability to transfer that ability to a
Canadian setting. This is not to say that I do not believe that Canadians have
endless things to learn from the great tradition of European life and thought -
but it does seem to me that somebody who was a Canadian and yet knew
Europe would be better in the university teaching philosophy than somebody
from the United Kingdom.
- George Grant to A.E. Kerr, late summer 1950

University education, if it is to be worth anything, must be aristocratic. (Aris-

tocratic, of course, not in the sense of birth, but of capability.) I do also know
that the most aristocratic part of a university must be a philosophy depart-
ment. Under the mysterious providence of God, not many men or women are
intended to understand life sub specie aeternitatis. We must grant that in their
strange way those students who do may become the most important mem-
bers of society. While at college they need the close and careful attention of
teachers.
- George Grant to A.E. Kerr, 29 February 1952

The Paradox of Democratic Education (1955)'

What do I mean by the paradox of the democratic educator? The para-

dox seems to me this: On the one hand, there is much in democracy to

In the context of eternity.

George Grant, 'The Paradox of Democratic Education,' The Bulletin (published by the
Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation), vol. 35, no. 6 (November 1955), 275-
80. (Second Ansley Memorial Lecture, delivered on 1 October 1955 at Assumption Uni-
versity, Windsor.)
 The Role of Education 175

which we must give loyalty; on the other hand, isn't there something in
democracy which we must fear as the enemy of true education?
It is of course impossible in short space to give a close definition of
democracy. In the present context I mean simply the kind of society we
have here in Canada. By so defining it, I do not intend to describe all
the forms of our society as democratic, for that is clearly contradicted
by our economic forms. Nevertheless, in a general sense we can speak
of our society as democratic.
Now, to state the one side of the paradox, I for one am clear about giv-
ing loyalty to that democracy, particularly as it is seen against possible
alternative systems of society abroad in the world. This allegiance must
be limited, of course, for it is idolatry to give more than limited alle-
giance to anything as relative as the ordering of society. And when I
speak of loyalty to that democracy, I do not only mean to its political
forms, but to its social forms as well. For instance, the idea of social equal-
ity, which is so much a product of the North American as against the
English tradition, is something to which I give wholehearted allegiance.
It is necessary to make this distinction between social and political
democracy, for these days there is a new conservatism abroad which
supports the political forms of democracy while attacking its social
forms. This conservatism has a great appeal, for it is based on the truth
that men are not equal in talents. And this truth certainly needs stress-
ing as against certain vacuous talk of our more naive progressive demo-
crats. It has, however, been the genius of Christianity, at its richest, to
hold together in tension both sides of the truth at this point. It has
remained clear that men are not equal in talents and yet has insisted on
the more mysterious truth that all persons being called by God to salva-
tion are equal before His majesty. If I may say a word in praise of the
Puritans, who have been so cheaply abused in recent years by the
humanists, it was this mystery of equality that they so well understood.
It is, indeed, at this point as much as any that I find the secular dem-
ocrat difficult to understand. If, as they do, one holds that man's des-
tiny is only in this world, how is it possible to believe in equality? In a
worldly sense, men are so obviously unequal. Therefore, if one is a con-
sistent secularist one should certainly not believe in social democracy.
Social and educational democracy is a doctrine which only has mean-
ing when seen to be rooted in a theological mystery. That mystery is the
recognition of both sin and love. Aristocratic forms of government are
rejected because the Christian is at once cynical of the ability of the
ruler to free himself from corruption, and hopeful of the possibility of
176 Philosophy and Education

the love of God in the life of the ordinary person. The value of the ordi-
nary person, socially and educationally, is recognized because he is an
object of the divine love. A tradition which knew that the Saviour of the
world was a crucified Palestine carpenter and his disciples certainly not
aristocrats, was one which recognized that the love of God can pour
into the hearts of the many. It is ultimately in terms of this idea alone
that any allegiance to social democracy can be maintained.
Nevertheless, once this side of the paradox has been stated, it seems
to me that the other side must be stated too. Is it not equally true that
democracy can openly and obviously be an enemy of true education? I
think this side of the case can be put most clearly by stating what Plato
says about the matter in his Republic.
You will remember that at the end of the Republic Plato describes the
decline of society and the soul. Having described the ideally good soci-
ety and the ideally good soul, he now describes the ideally bad, which
he calls despotism. He does not believe that the ideally good or bad are
possible in this world. They are described simply as ethical principles of
attraction and repulsion. And in the scale between the good and the
bad he places the democratic society and soul very low - as indeed the
last step before the descent of man into the depths of despotism. He
describes democracy as that state in which the lowest common denom-
inator of desire rules and where every institution is dominated by this
lowest common denominator of desire. By lowest common denomina-
tor of desire, he means that the desires arising from the appetites have
taken over the person, and have become the ruling principle. Reason
has been dethroned. Democracy must therefore destroy itself because
it will become a chaos. It will become a chaos because, as people give
themselves ever more and more to the pursuit of the immediate claims
of appetite, the ordering power of reason disappears. In short, by defi-
nition democracy is the purest and most blatant love of the world as an
end - that is, secularism.
And surely once we look at the present education situation in Can-
ada, don't we see how true is what Plato says? I have not time here to
describe in detail the situation in our schools and universities as I see it.
Of the universities, suffice it to say that in general they have become
servants of the expanding economy. They are places where our young-
sters go to be taught certain techniques which will allow them to enter
or remain in the more prosperous part of society. They are largely ser-
vants of that appetite which is dominant in the cleverer part of our soci-
ety - namely greed. Any idea of education which transcends that is the
 The Role of Education 177

merest minority report. And though I cannot speak of the schools from
inside knowledge, my view of them, certainly those in Nova Scotia, is
that in large measure they are places where youngsters are taught to
adjust themselves to the lowest common denominator of achievement.
I will allow myself simply one example to illustrate how our modern
education leads us to take this distrust of democracy seriously: the
degree to which the philosophy of John Dewey has been influential.
Only a society which already accepted a very low view of human nature
and destiny would have responded the way it did and does to what
Dewey said about human existence and the purpose of education. For
whatever is valid in Dewey at the level of practical techniques, the phi-
losophy which underlies it is nothing more finally than that worship of
the lowest common denominator of appetite which Plato describes.
This is explicitly spelled out in Dewey's position. The world of space
and time is seen as the ultimately real. Reason is, therefore, defined as
the instrument whereby we learn to adjust ourselves to that world. And
if adjustment to the world can in effect mean anything else than adjust-
ment to the lowest common denominator of desire, then I wish some-
body would show me. What Plato sees as the tragedy of democracy,
namely the gradual abdication by the higher faculties of their rule over
man, Dewey accepts as the true end of education. About one thing I am
crystal clear: if, as the Deweyites claim, their philosophy of education is
the truly democratic view, then democracy is a state of society in which
true education cannot flourish. And what I must emphasize again is
that the very fact that pragmatism should have had such power over the
minds of so many people influential in our democratic school system
could only have been possible if our view of man had already degener-
ated under democracy; and that shows us how seriously we must take
the claim that such a low view is implicit in the system.
To return to the paradox: what I have said I hope illustrates how
much it is a real paradox and not just a dilemma I am putting up to
knock down. The more I think about the question, the harder it is to
find reconciliation either at the level of thought or action. How does
one reconcile one's deep loyalty to the tradition of democracy with the
undoubted debasement of education that our democracy brings?
Of course, one can get out of the dilemma in two ways - by dropping
either side of the difficulty. One can simply just not recognize the ten-
dencies towards debasement and to see the democratic system as a glo-
rious progressive affair - broadening down from precedent to
precedent. This is what so many school and university teachers and
178 Philosophy and Education

administrators do. They simply get on the bandwagon of vulgarity and

ride it with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, one can
solve the dilemma by simply discarding all faith in democratic educa-
tion. But that is wrong in principle because it surrenders for all practi-
cal purposes the Christian mystery of love. It is also apt to mean that
one just retreats out of the modern world and to do that is to forget one
of the supreme principles of ethics, namely that though we may dislike
the world in which we are placed, it is the only one we've got - that is,
it is the society into which God has called us to act. The only alternative,
therefore, to escaping the paradox is to live in its tension.

I want to illustrate this paradox further in relation to a certain philos-

ophy of the modern democratic school which seems to me to exert
great influence in our midst. In the mixture of truth and falsity which
that philosophy represents, I think one sees more clearly what demo-
cratic education is.
I heard this theory expressed over and over again this summer at a
conference on the philosophy of education held by the Ontario Teach-
ers' Federation which I had the great good fortune to attend. The
exponents of this theory say something like the following:

The democratic society of North America is based upon certain moral val-
ues which were first formulated in the Judaic-Christian tradition. There-
fore, because one of the chief aims of our school system is to teach
allegiance to the democratic society, we must try by any means appropri-
ate to inculcate those values into the minds of our youngsters. Neverthe-
less, this must not mean that the schools should touch the field of
ultimately reality - that is, the field of religion. This is a personal matter
with which the schools cannot interfere. Indeed, it would be against true
democracy to teach about religion, for as people disagree as to what is ulti-
mately real, to teach about it would be to infringe the personal freedom of
the individual to reacb his conclusions on this matter. In short, ethical val-
ues are a common ground where the public schools can act with authority
- that is, endeavour to inculcate; religious truth, however, is a personal
matter and thereon the public schools must not be allowed to speak.

Now, the position outlined in this report recognizes certain unfor-

 The Role of Education 179

gettable truths about our society. The mass society is here and there-
fore we are committed to the problem of mass education. Moreover,
the report maintains that we should be committed to that task in joy
because of the value of each person, and as I have said earlier I entirely
agree with that. It predicts that technological advances will give the
majority more leisure than ever before in history. It recognizes that in a
society of such varying traditions it is inevitable that the state, as the
only common institution, should play a central role in education. I
have not time to discuss in detail the extraordinarily subtle question of
church and state in a society which is religiously pluralist, and though I
disagree with much that the report says on this matter, it is still right
when it says that North American democracy is committed to pluralism
and that therefore the state schools must respect it. This respect will
insure that the school shall not encroach on the duties of the church
and the home. Lastly, we can even admit that this document expresses
one side of the truth when it says that one's religion is a personal mat-
ter. This is true in the sense that final reality, being spirit, can only be
encountered in a free act of the spirit. However, that is only half the
truth as traditions, education, institutions, and authority are, of course,
also necessary to that encounter.
Nevertheless, as soon as one has stated the truth in this report, it is
necessary to state with full force its basic falsehood. I am going to illus-
trate this falsity in two ways: (i) with regard to the proper ordering of
studies; (ii) with regard to the divorcing of values from reality.
First, then, why is this position shown to be false when we look at the
question of the proper ordering of studies? To prove this I will have to
lay down certain basic propositions. The school is the chief instrument
in our society for the cultivation of the human reason - particularly the
theoretical reasons as distinct from practical reason which is cultivated
at all points in our life. Now, why do we count it good to cultivate the
theoretical reason in ourselves and others? There are many subsidiary
purposes for that cultivation, but the fundamental purpose is, as Aristo-
tle says, that all men desire to know the real and that therefore the final
object of the cultivation of reason is that we may know what is ultimately
real - that is, God. Now, this proposition, which is obviously central to
the philosophy of education, cannot be justified at length here. It is the
ultimate truth of human existence and therefore the hardest truth to
prove to oneself or to others. I may say, however, and this will seem to
some of you extreme arrogance, that I do not count this truth to be
mere opinion, something of which I am not certain. I am certain of it in
the sense that, though I cannot prove it to be true, I can prove all dif-
180 Philosophy and Education

fering positions to be false and therefore must assume this as necessary.

It is a truth which is assumed in all rational activity - scientific, philo-
sophic, artistic, or moral.
But if this proposition is true, then it will shape our schools at all
points particularly as to the proper ordering of studies. How can we do
a proper job of education unless we have some clarity as to what educa-
tion is for? How can the purpose for which we study not determine
what studies are carried on?
Let me illustrate this from contemporary education. There doesn't
seem to be much doubt from anybody in education that careful study
of certain traditional subjects, whether at the university or school level,
is dying out. Now, the progressive educators tell us, and I think rightly,
that this is not a necessary result of the new methods. The traditional
subjects can be well taught under the new methods. So much of the old
discipline in the school and the home was quite wrong. But when the
progressive educators have said this they have not freed themselves
from the charge of being deeply responsible for the decline of the old
studies. Their responsibility is not, however, at the level of practical
method but of theory. Their philosophy is that the purpose of educa-
tion is successful living in this world: they deny any transcendent end to
education. This is explicitly and continually stated in Dewey. There-
fore, as the end is different, different studies are necessary.
Why was classical language and history studied in the old schools? It
was not studied only to give exactness in language or to give examples
from history so that men would be the better able to manipulate their
present. After all, as the progressive educators have said time and
again, these purposes could be equally well served by modern language
and modern history. It was studied so that the ablest in our society -
those who were going to have responsibility in church and state and
education - would be able later to learn those philosophic truths which
are found in the classical thinkers. These truths indeed were known to
be basic to any later understanding of Christian theology, the knowl-
edge of which was recognized as the pinnacle to which all education
aspired. Mathematics was not taught primarily so that we could have
enough capable engineers but because through it the intellect could
learn to isolate concepts and so be ready later to ascertain universal
truth at a higher level.
Now, of course, when you think there is no transcendent truth to be
ascertained, no God to be known, when you think as Dewey does that
the purpose of education is adjustment to this world, then the empha-
 The Role of Education 181

sis of your curriculum will be entirely different and what students think
important to study will be entirely different. I am sure you all see this
every day of your lives as I do. One of the reasons for the existence of
the university in which I work is that it is a great exporter of commercial
lawyers to the temples of Bay Street in Toronto. Now, to be successfully
adjusted to the world of Bay Street you do not need any knowledge of
classical history or philosophy (a certain attenuated culture may be
necessary but that can be picked up at a session of the Harvard School
of Business Administration and by careful attention at cocktail parties).
Therefore, classics and philosophy are not considered important either
by the administration or by students. The same example could be given
by our export of research physicists or chemists to the government lab-
oratories in Ottawa.
How are we to speak to students clearly outside some philosophy as to
what is ultimately real? Are we to encourage students to study this or that
and yet not be able to tell them the purpose of studying this or that?
Now, of course, the answer we give to younger students may have to be
of an indirect or even allegorical kind. We may have to say to them you
can't yet see why mathematics is important, if one is to advance to
higher studies, but trust me that it is. Yet all the same we have to be clear
in ourselves or else the brighter the student the more he will see educa-
tion as pointless and chaotic.
There is a popular modern position which tries to escape any state-
ment about ultimate reality by that wonderful platitude that the pur-
pose of the school is to teach people to think. A dean of education from
western Canada was down in Halifax saying this to our teachers last
week and I hear it from many quarters. This position has the advantage
of seeming to be a compromise which appeals to both the traditionalist
and the progressive. But, of course, it entirely breaks down as soon as
one asks the simple question - why is it good to think? Won't I be hap-
pier if I don't think, if, for instance, I don't go near the study of philos-
ophy? And when one tries to answer that question one is forced to some
view of what really matters in life. Either one says one should think
because it will help one to get on in the world and that is what matters;
or think because it will teach you what is real, it will give you the vision
of God. And I would point out again that only the second answer has
any value in persuading youngsters to study any subject which takes one
beyond the palpably useful.
What I have been saying is that a philosophy is necessarily implied in
the schools. Students will study subjects, institutions will teach subjects
182 Philosophy and Education

according to their view of reality. This is an inescapable fact of educa-

tion. People who believe what Dewey says are in fact shaping the curric-
ulum by their metaphysics; my criticism of them is simply that they have
a false metaphysic. Therefore, when this report says that the demo-
cratic school must not be based on any view of what is ultimately real,
aren't the writers of it just fooling themselves or trying to fool the pub-
lic? For surely what the report is saying is rather that the schools must
indeed take a view of reality but a very inadequate one; namely reality as
it appears to the common sense of the mass. And if this is so, then
doesn't the report illustrate exactly what Plato says, that democracy is
the rule of the lowest common denominator and as such an enemy of
true education?
This indeed takes me to my second point concerning values in which
the central fallacy of the position advocated in this report is exposed. As
in regard to the ordering of studies, so in this question the falsity of the
theory is inseparable from its disastrous results in practice.
Values depend on what is real. It is a simple fact that what actions we
think to be good depend on what we think is ultimately real. Therefore,
to have right values we must have a right apprehension of the real. To
put it technically, ethics depend on metaphysics. For example, if a man
believes that the struggle for animal existence is the underlying truth of
all nature and history, obviously the virtue of brotherhood will not
seem valuable. Or again, if we believe that persons are but instruments
of the life force, then of course chastity is not the supreme value of the
sexual life. For Christianity, the highest activity possible for man is
redemptive love, which of necessity includes in itself suffering. But we
cannot see why such an activity is valuable unless in some sense we rec-
ognize the truth of Christian theology about the purposes of the divine
love in the world. If indeed in some sense we do not see history in this
pattern then remedial suffering will seem to us just queer - as the psy-
chologists say, the kind of thing which masochists indulge in. To
repeat, what one believes to be ultimately true, not what seems nice,
will determine what actions one really thinks valuable.
I see this fact in the universities. For example, in the Dalhousie med-
ical school there are many professors who themselves believe and imply
in all they teach that man can be totally understood as animal. Yet these
professors are horrified when one of their students cheats, or when
they see the old medical ethics breaking down before the growing love
of money among the doctors. But why should they be? If man is simply
an animal, morality is an illusion and then why shouldn't students
 The Role of Education 183

cheat, why shouldn't one try to amass more nuts than the other squir-
rels? And what always seems most amazing to me in this is how little
these professors see that what they have been teaching students over
the years about ultimate reality (namely that man can be fully known as
a biological object) has had a direct effect in producing the kind of
doctors they now dislike.
Obviously, the same thing applies in the schools. If you have schools
where the best teachers assert that what is real is the world of space and
time, as so many teachers do, then it is foolish to try and impose in that
school a set of values which come from a very different view of reality.
All you do then is to produce chaos. The clever children see the incon-
sistency and the stupid are meanly tricked. One is saying to them that
brotherhood matters in terms of this world. When they go out into the
world they soon find that brotherhood does not bring success in
worldly terms - that it just means they get taken. Then the inference
from that is that the value of brotherhood is just part of that pious non-
sense which schools put over but which nobody means.
This is the basic failure of this document of the National Edvication
Association. Its failure is at the level of philosophy and theoretical con-
sistency. There is nothing wrong with the document at the level of prac-
tical virtue. (It has, indeed, more pious exhortations to virtue per
square inch of print than any other document I have ever read.) But
the proposition that we can hope to inculcate Judaic-Christian values
while eliminating any systematic teaching and thought about what is
real must be criticized philosophically. For if what I said is true: namely
that values are the flowers, the roots of which are our affirmation about
metaphysics, then this document is telling us that the flowers can be
kept alive when they are cut off from their roots. If you can believe that,
you can believe anything.
But though this is what this report states explicitly, really what is
implied is a deeper philosophy than that. What is implied in every line
of this document is a profound irrationalism. Positively, this irrational-
ism takes the form of saying that the natural and social sciences are the
way we find out what is real, while religion and values are concerned
with subjective preferences arising largely from the emotions. Religion
is thought of as a kind of emotional certainty and volitional commit-
ment a la Billy Graham, and values are thought of as the right emo-
tional attitudes the democratic society wants to inculcate. Reality is
thought of as the sensuous world of space and time, and truth about
reality as the accumulation of facts through the sciences. Negatively,
184 Philosophy and Education

that is, the document denies the basic proposition of Western thought
that the reason, practical and theoretical, is the faculty by which man
apprehends ultimate reality and that therefore that reality is supersen-
sible. The assumption throughout is that values and religion are mat-
ters of opinion, not matters where truth can be discovered by proper
use of the mind. The position is something like this. On the one side
you have a world of facts of reality gained by the sciences; on the other
hand you have an emotional world of value and religion. The human
being is broken down the middle. Reason operates for dealing with the
world but not for giving one truth for how one should act or what one
should worship.
In other words, however much this report tries to escape any accusa-
tion of Deweyism, by an avowed friendship to religion and values, it
really is in exactly the same position. For the basic proposition of Dewey
is still there - namely that reason is only an instrument for manipulat-
ing the world. The religious, ethical, and metaphysical questions of
mankind are a realm where reason cannot operate. And, of course, if
this presupposition of the document is true then all its practical pro-
posals logically follow. But this proposition cannot possibly be justified
in thought. You cannot by reason show that reason has no power.
I have spoken of the position advocated in this report at length
because it illustrates a truth which tends to be forgotten in a society
such as ours. That truth is this: a position which, practically, seems both
decent and feasible in the short run, may still be false philosophically
and so can only be disastrous in the long run.
But, of course, if the philosophy of education is to be of service it
must not put itself outside the awful responsibilities of time. And that
means that the short run and the long run must be brought together.
In relation to the position in this report the tension of our minds
must be to see in unity its short-term truth and its long-term falsity.
How are we to recognize that mass democracy is here and that in love
we must care about it? How are we to take that seriously and still rec-
ognize that the purpose of education is the movement of the mind to
God and that therefore all activities in the schools must be seen in
that context?
And as I have said, this question presents to me no easy solution. I
do not see any coordinated plan of group action (the kind of thing
that we in North America are so fond of) that can take us off the hook
of this predicament. It is a tension which all of us have to live through.
Therefore, I am in no position to end this talk by introducing some
 The Role of Education 185

deus ex machina. A fellow, who is now very prominent in universities

circles in central Canada, always seems at this point to come up with
the proposition 'Give me five million dollars and I will save Western
civilization.' I do not mean to say anything of that sort. For one thing
nobody can know how others will live out the tensions and agonies of
this life. And how this situation is met in North America will depend
on how thousands of us live out those agonies.
There are, however, two things which do not seem to me pretentious
to say. First and foremost, I must repeat the platitude that what matters
above anything else in this is that there should be teachers who know
deeply what education is for and whose wills are committed to what
their intellects have seen. Only such people can lead the young to real-
ity. Only such people will have the courage to be teachers in a world
which does not take the intellect seriously and which therefore thinks
teaching is unimportant besides medicine or engineering, stock-brok-
ing or salesmanship. And the first consideration of such teachers must
be to be steeped in the reality they teach about. Those who teach math-
ematics or literature or classics or history or natural science must know
deeply the reality with which these subjects are concerned. That is why
method must be known as subordinate to subject matter. Of course,
methods are important but to lift them up as sacred cows is obviously to
lose sight of what they are for. They are a means through which young
people may be brought to partake in reality as given in the subject
taught.
But the teacher must have more than simply a knowledge of reality at
the level of his subject. He must see reality at that level in its proper sub-
ordination to what is ultimately real. He must have given his mind over
seriously to the philosophy of education. And this is necessary, because
if reality is only known in segments, the segment which is known cannot
help but be distorted. For, if the teacher of literature, however much he
is steeped in the poets, has not thought about the relation of poetic
beauty to the final beauty, his teaching is liable to end up in a rather
insipid aestheticism. And even more important, if the teacher of sci-
ence does not see that the reality of nature must be seen in its relation
and dependence on other realities, the teaching of science can lead
youngsters to the cheapest kind of materialism. And as soon as one has
said this, it is clear that the teacher must have thought about philo-
sophic truth. I do not mean by this simply a few pleasant aphorisms

A god from a machine; saved in a contrived and lucky manner (Latin).

186 Philosophy and Education

picked up on the side (for this I am afraid is what the philosophy of

education conies down to in many of our colleges of education) but
that he must strive to think things as a whole not only as a student but
throughout his life.
This seems to me particularly important in these days. All of us in the
modern world are dominated far more than we know by the world view
given us by empirical science and pragmatic philosophy. It distorts our
thought at all points, and we find it of incredible difficulty to think
beyond it - let alone outside it. Now, I do not want to say that philoso-
phy is the only way of preventing that world view from gradually taking
us over completely, because art and love, prayer and worship, are also
important. Nevertheless, philosophic thought is crucial. If we can take
the domination by this world view up into our rational mind by seeing
it in the light of the great philosophers and theologians of the past and
present, we can then hold this scientific, pragmatic world view in per-
spective - see it for what it is, a partial and inadequate truth which is not
final and therefore something which must not become an idolatry.
Only if we ourselves are not swamped by the modern world view can we
hope to lead youngsters to the truth which is beyond that view.
I know this is not easy. All of us are pushed hard at work and the bet-
ter the youngsters we have the more our minds are pushed to keep up
with them. We are pushed to make a go of it economically for ourselves
and our families. We are pushed to wash dishes and spend time with
our own children. We are taken up into the busyness and social life
which is typical of Canadian communities. Despite all these other
duties, however, one thing is clear: to be a good teacher one must have
a private life of study and thought of one's own. Otherwise we are sim-
ply pulled into the mediocrity we are trying to change.
We must have, then, a life of loneliness. One of the clearest state-
ments in the Old Testament is: 'Be still and know that I am God.'
Indeed, one of the dangerous half truths of progressive theory is its
attack on the idea of loneliness. I often meet teachers who take so seri-
ously the emphasis on the group and on social adjustment that they
criticize the more aloof children as immature for not participating in
the group. That aloofness may be a mark of maturity, of having discov-
ered at even a very young age the riches of loneliness. This is not to
deny the idea of community - but if the community is to be more than
a beehive it must be made up of individuals who are in themselves
something. A group is not by definition good. We must remember that
a group of a million could still be nothing. For nothing plus nothing
 Resignation from York 187

plus nothing (even a million times) is still nothing. That is, as teachers
we must cultivate our aloneness so that when we come to a group, we
come as somebody.
Secondly, I would like to say that the temptation we must watch
above any other is despair. In England there is a tombstone of a seven-
teenth-century Puritan divine who lived through the agonies of the
civil war and on his tombstone is written: 'He did the best things at the
worst times and hoped for them in the most calamitous.' Let that be
written on ours. Despair for the teacher these days may so often lead to
what I would call a Brahmin view of education - that is the view that we
can touch a few choice spirits, but that the rest of the world is lost in
ignorance.
A figure out of our history whom I like to contemplate in this connec-
tion is St Augustine - the African philosopher and theologian. August-
ine lived at a period when it was hard to believe that history was to some
purpose - the dissolution of classical society was all around him. He saw
clearly that the principles abroad in that society necessarily meant its
degeneration into increasing chaos. But in that situation he did not
despair; nor, what is more important, did he take a wrongly other-
worldly view. It was, indeed, in this terrible crisis of the classical world
that Augustine affirmed with greater clarity than had ever been stated
before that God is not alone the God beyond the world, but is also
working in each moment of the historical. So from this hope the seeds
of new meaning in the world as well as beyond it were planted not only
for himself, but for others. He knew that despair was wrong, because
despair always assumes that the issue of history lies finally with our-
selves. Bui clearly it is not with ourselves that the ultimate issue lies. Our
hope lies rather in One who is power and reason and love, Who has
indeed most manifestly shown us that power and love and reason are in
Him, One - eternally.

RESIGNATION FROM YORK

In late 1959 Grant accepted a position as head of the philosophy department in

the newly created, York University in Toronto. However, he resigned before taking
up his position. He considered that control over the curriculum was essential for
a university teacher, and, he refused, to have the content or the textbooks for his
188 Philosophy and Education

courses chosen by others. This letter outlines the reasons for his decision.
Although it was not published, Grant intended it as a formal statement.

Letter of Resignation (1960)

14 April 1960
Dear President Ross,
This isjust to say that after long thought I have decided it would be wrong
on my part to introduce youngsters to philosophy by means of Professor
Long's textbook' and that as there seems no alternative to such a pro-
cedure at York, I must with regret submit my resignation to you.
As this is an important matter of academic principle I would like to
state my objections to this procedure, (a) Professor Long's textbook
pretends to be an introduction to philosophy which does not take sides,
but introduces the student objectively to the problems of the subject.
This is, however, not the case. To illustrate why it is not the case, let me
take as an example the basic question of the differences between classi-
cal and modern philosophy. Professor Long's book is based on the pre-
supposition that the assumptions of nineteenth century philosophy are
true in a way that implies that those of the classical philosophy are not.
As an obvious example, the book is prefaced by a quotation from Less-
ing which is taken as true and which implies that Plato and Aristotle
largely wrote untruth. It is, of course, not my purpose here to debate
the very vexed and difficult questions of the quarrel between the
ancients and the moderns, but simply to say that one hardly has an
objective textbook when it is based on such an assumption. What makes
these assumptions particularly unobjective is that they are not made
explicit in the work, (b) When I say that Professor Long's book is based
on an implied assumption of the truth of modern philosophy, I do not
mean contemporary philosophy, but the philosophy of the late nine-
teenth century in Great Britain and the early twentieth in the U.S.A.
His book is oblivious to nearly all contemporary philosophy. For
instance, there is no mention of Wittgenstein in his book - certainly the
most influential modern philosopher in professional philosophic cir-
cles in the English-speaking world, (c) Apart from the assumptions of
the book, its very method seems to me inimical to the proper teaching
of philosophy. It is about philosophy; it is not philosophy. The result of
this approach is to encourage sophism among youngsters - that is, it
From William Christian, ed., George. Grant: Selected Le.tte.rs (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press 1996).
Marcus Long, The Spirit of Philosophy (1953).
 Resignation from York 189

encourages them to say here are a lot of opinions about this subject and
that, but it does not encourage them in the real task of trying to make
true judgments about those matters.
I would like to include a paragraph about Professor Long's relation
to religion and my own, because I am sure you have heard it said that I
confuse religion and philosophy and that you will now hear it said that
my objection to Professor Long's book comes from my religion. Let
me make it clear that I consider the practice of religion and the prac-
tice of philosophy two distinct human activities. I do not think that phi-
losophy can prove or disprove Christian doctrine. My position on this
matter is illustrated by the fact that the philosopher I admire most in
North America is Leo Strauss at Chicago. He is a practising Jew and I
would have no hesitation in saying that he is a better philosopher than
any practising Christian I know on this continent. Some of my best
graduate students have been practisingjews and I have had no difficul-
ties with them on this score. Of course, though religion and philoso-
phy are distinct activities, their relation is a philosophic question of
magnitude and Professor Long inevitably deals with it. Unfortunately
he does not deal with it accurately. If, for instance, you turn to what
Professor Long says about the relation between philosophy and the
idea of revelation in certain religions on p. 23 of this book, I do not
think one could find any trained philosophers who are either believing
Protestants or Catholics or Jews who would say that it is an accurate or
adequate account of the matter. I did not ask that the textbooks I use
should be directed towards the spread of my religion. (I suggested the
works of Plato and Russell neither of whom are in any way identified
with the Christian church and neither of whom are in any way identi-
fied with the true.) But I could hardly be expected to use a textbook
which misrepresents the religion of my allegiance. I would also point
out that though Professor Long deplores the influence of faith on cer-
tain philosophers, he has no hesitation in closely identifying the claims
of his faith with the facts of the case. It is in my opinion just this which
above all makes Professor Long's book so poor an instrument for
introducing youngsters to philosophy most of whom will have been
born since 1940 in modern industrial Canada. Professor Long's faith
was obviously formed by the experience of his break with a limited Cal-
vinism in light of certain philosophic and scientific ideas. This was a
very moving and formative experience for the English of the 1890s, for
the Americans of the early 1900s, and for Canadians in the 1920s, but it
has little bearing on the situation of Canadians growing up in Ontario
at the moment.
190 Philosophy and Education

Some of my friends have suggested that I should get up in class and

quietly say where I think the required textbook is inadequate. This
would indeed be fun; but it would also be unjust. It would leave the
beginners with two conflicting accounts and an exam to be faced. This
might be good for the clever, but it would be radically unfair for the
weaker brethren. Also I would hope that if my teaching were good the
better students would understand the inadequacy of the book. Then
they would surely ask (if I had the right relation with them) why I
employed it as a textbook. To that question I would have no just answer
- beyond appealing to the necessity of earning my living, my liking for
my home town, etc. Such considerations would not stand up against the
unflinching moral judgments of which youngsters are capable.
Professor Anderson told Professor Long to write to me about
details, where his own letter covered the matter unequivocally in terms
of general policy. Professor Long told me I could use other textbooks.
He included a list of these which Professor Anderson would consider
suitable. I do not see, however, that this makes possible any solution
because if the York students have to write Toronto exams, marked by
Toronto examiners, the use of an alternative textbook would cause an
unfair burden on York students. Professor Long's textbook is suffi-
ciently idiosyncratic that I do not see how students could answer ques-
tions chosen from it by studying from some other textbooks. The
burden here would particularly fall on the marginal student, of which
there are bound to be some at York.
I am sorry that this resignation has been left so long, but it has only
become clear to me gradually in the last months the degree to which
York is going to be tied to the U of T and the consequences that this
would have on my teaching at York ...
With all best wishes,
George Grant

THE MULTIVERSITY

During the 1960s the secularizing trends in Canadian universities picked up

speed. Grant began to refer to the universities as 'multiversities' because he

Fulton Anderson, University of Toronto philosopher.

 The Multiversity 191

thought that they had lost any sense of a unity of knowledge. And did not believe
that the growing fragmentation of knowledge was an innocent trend: it served,
the interests of the dominant elites in North American society.

The University Curriculum (1975)*

The chief purpose of the curriculum in our universities is to facilitate

the production of personnel necessary to that type of society.
Because there is such agreement about the chief goal of society,
there is a vast consensus about the principles of the curriculum.
Debates take place about the government of the university, about
humane existence within it, etc., but not about what it concerns a
human being to know. So monolithic is the agreement of society
about ends, so pervasive the ideology of liberalism which expresses
that agreement that the question about knowing cannot be raised
seriously. (I mean by liberalism a set of beliefs which proceed from
the central assumption that man's essence is his freedom and there-
fore that what chiefly concerns us in this life is to shape the world as
we want it.) When a student first arrives at university, the curriculum
may appear a set of arbitrary and incoherent details. This is so only at
the surface. In fact, it can be understood in terms of the powers and
purposes of our society.
The chief job of the universities within the technological societies is
the cultivation of those sciences which issue in the mastery of human
and non-human nature.

It would, of course, be absurd to deny that the pure desire to know is

present in many modern scientists. In my experience, such a desire
exists in the community of natural scientists more than in any other
group in our society. Also, I would assert on principle that such a desire
belongs to man as man. What I am saying is that in science the motive
of wonder becomes ever more subsidiary to the motive of power, and
that those scientists still dominated by wonder have a more difficult

George Grant, The University Curriculum and the Technological Threat,' in The Sci-
ences, the Humanities, and the. Technological Threat, ed W. Roy Niblett (London: University
of London 1975), 21-35. Written first in 1968.
192 Philosophy and Education

time resisting the forces of power which press in upon them from with-
out their community.

Within the last hundred years it has become increasingly clear that
the technological society requires not only the control of non-human
nature, but equally the control of human nature.

For the social scientists to play their controlling role required that they
should come to interpret their sciences as 'value-free.' This clarification
has been carried out particularly by sociologists, and, indeed, it is inev-
itable from its very subject matter that this science should be magisterial
among the social sciences. The use of the term 'value' and the distin-
guishing of judgments about values from judgments about facts enables
the social scientist to believe that his account of reality is objective, while
all previous accounts (which were not based on this distinction) were
vitiated by their confusion of normative with factual statements. It is not
appropriate in this writing to describe the history of the idea of 'value-
free' social science as it came to be in the European tradition, particu-
larly under the influence of Kant and Nietzsche, and was so elegantly
formulated by Weber. Nor is it necessary to describe how it has been
reformulated in liberal Protestant terms by such men as Parsons and
Lasswell' to suit the American scene. What is important to understand
is that the quantification-oriented behaviourial sciences which have
arisen from this methodological history are wonderfully appropriate for
serving the tasks of control necessary to a technological society. Indeed,
where the fact-value distinction was originally formulated by Weber as a
means whereby the academy could hold itself free from the pressures of
the powerful, it has quickly become a means whereby the university can
make itself socially useful. Social sciences so defined are well adapted to
serve the purposes of the ruling private and public corporations.
Indeed, the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of
value has been thought to be favourable to a pluralist society. The

Talcott Parsons (1902-79), Harvard-based American sociologist, one of the most influ-
ential theorists of the twentieth century.
H.D. Lasswell (b. 1902), distinguished American political scientist.
 The Multiversity 193

common or objective world would be that of facts known scientifically,

leaving men free to choose their values for themselves. However, this
distinction has worked in exactly the opposite direction towards the
monism of technological values. From the assumption that scientific
method is not concerned with judgments of values, it is but a short step
to assert that reason cannot tell us anything about good and bad, and
that, therefore, judgments of value are subjective preferences based on
our particular emotional makeup. But the very idea that good and bad
are subjective preferences removes one possible brake from the trium-
phant chariot of technology. The rhetoric of pluralism simply legiti-
mizes the monistic fact.
The 'value-free' social sciences not only provide the means of con-
trol, but also provide a large percentage of the preachers who proclaim
the dogmas which legitimize modern liberalism within the university.
At first sight it might be thought that practitioners of 'value-free' sci-
ence would not make good preachers. In looking more closely, how-
ever, it will be seen that the fact-value distinction is not self-evident, as is
often claimed. It assumes a particular account of moral judgment, and
a particular account of objectivity. To use the language of value about
moral judgment is to assume that what man is doing when he is moral
is choosing in his freedom to make the world according to his own val-
ues which are not derived from knowledge of the cosmos. To confine
the language of objectivity to what is open to quantifiable experiment is
to limit purpose to our own subjectivity. As these metaphysical roots of
the fact-value distinction are not often evident to those who affirm the
method, they are generally inculcated in what can be best described as
a religious way; that is, as a doctrine beyond question.
I do not mean to imply any insincerity on the part of those teachers
who preach this doctrine. Throughout history the best preachers have
often been those who thought they were talking about universally self-
evident facts. Nor should it be implied that our multiversities ought riot
to fulfil this legitimizing role. Class liberalism is the ideological cement
for a technological society of our type. Its sermons have to be preached
to the young, and the multiversities are the appropriate place. That the
clever have to put up with this as a substitute for the cultivation of the
intellect is a price they must pay to the interest of the majority who are
in need of some public religion. And the fact-value distinction is the
most sacred doctrine of our public religion.
194 Philosophy and Education

In the last hundred years in Europe, a series of justifications of

humane study arose in the light of the crisis produced by the age of
progress. Each of these passing justifications made certain particular
studies dominant for their particular hour. For example, Dilthey's dis-
tinction between Naturwissenschaft and GeisteswissenschafV led to the
enormous concentration on the study of history as that which would
fulfil the role which once had been played by the traditional philoso-
phy and theology. By studying history men could understand the alter-
natives of the past, see where they were and be enlightened to choose
where they were going. The humanities became the sciences of the
human spirit which culminated in that new subject, the philosophy of
history. This position was in turn destroyed by Nietzsche when he
showed that history could not, any more than God, provide men with a
horizon within which to live. In terms of this critique, Weber taught
that a humane and scientific sociology could fulfil the magisterial role.
Over the century these various justifications have had their necessary
moment, but as they have succeeded each other, the humanities have
become smaller and smaller islands in a rising lake. The drowning lake
was the ever more clearly formulated assumption that all the important
questions can be solved by technological means.

Indeed, in many liberal minds widespread university education was

seen as fulfilling the role which had been played by revelation in the
once dominant Calvinist Protestantism. When revelation no longer
appeared to be a fact to the powerful classes, the hope appeared among
some that the humanities in the universities would teach men the best
purposes. This popular hope could never be realized for the following
reason: those who knew the humanities professionally were aware of
what was going on in Europe. The best of them knew that social
thought was methodologically dominated by 'historicism' and 'the fact-
value distinction.' Historicism was the belief that the values of any cul-
ture were relative to the absolute presuppositions of that culture which
were themselves historically determined, and that therefore men could
not in their reasoning transcend their own epoch. The fact-value dis-
tinction led generally to the conclusion that there was no rational way

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), German psychologist and philosopher.

The study of nature and the study of human actions.
 The Multiversity 195

of knowing that one way of life was nobler than another. Those who
studied the humanities were led to a great uncertainty about what con-
stituted the good life, and whether this was a real question at all. The
public hope that the humanities would fulfil a positive moral role was,
therefore, vitiated by the fact that the best professionals of these disci-
plines did not see their activity in this way. Indeed, it is a fact of North
American history that the spread of professional teaching in the
humanities has been a means whereby the scepticism of Europe has
penetrated the more innocent traditions of North America.
The professional practitioners of the humanities have justified their
studies quite differently from the popular rhetoric. They have increas-
ingly said that the humanities are non-evaluative sciences. The cruder
form of this justification has led those disciplines to become highly
research-oriented, so that they could cover themselves with the mantle
of science and Protestant busy-ness. An enormous amount of energy
and money has been channelled into research projects. In English lit-
erature there are many great factories pouring out editions, commen-
taries, and lives on all but the minuscule figures of our literature. (The
equivalent of the expensive equipment of the scientist are the rare
manuscript libraries.) If one has a steady nerve, it is useful to contem-
plate how much is written about Beowulf in one year in North Amer-
ica. One can look at the Shakespeare industry with perhaps less sense of
absurdity; but when it comes to figures such as Horace Walpole^ having
their own factory, one must beware vertigo. The difficulty in this
research orientation is that whereas research in the progressive sci-
ences produces discoveries which the public see as useful, this is not so
in the humanities. The historian may claim that all the careful work
that goes into small areas can be justified as useful in that it makes up
the totality of a mosaic from which those who are educated in the disci-
pline may better know the past and so make more prudent judgments
in the present. He may even claim that the formal discipline of Name-
rian+ history is in itself a good training for potential rulers. Both these
justifications may be true, although the proof of this would require a
discussion of the place of historical judgment in the training of rulers.
What is, however, paradoxical at the practical level about the vast appa-

The great Anglo-Saxon saga.

A minor English literary figure of the eighteenth century.
Sir Lewis Namier was a British historian who believed that history could best be
explained by reference to the personal motives of individuals.
196 Philosophy and Education

ratus of modern historical scholarship is that it exists in an age when it

is increasingly believed that the race has little to learn from human
existence from before the age of progress. We may be grateful that this
contempt for the past has not yet penetrated the ranks of academic his-
torians, who therefore remain the chief brake on the simply modern in
our multiversities. Nevertheless, the role of brake is a very minor one
compared with the pre-progressive role of the humanities.

Non-evaluative analysts see their activity as essentially self-justifying.

They are moved by the pure desire to know; for example, the sheer joy
in mastery over such a diverse field as literature. This gives the human-
ities freedom from the crude pressures of society, as can be seen by
comparison with the popular justification of the humanities which has
been described earlier. In the popular account, the natural scientists
were supposed to know so that they could provide material tech-
niques; the teachers of humanities were supposed to know so that they
could be purveyors of values. In both cases, the pure desire to know
was considered subsidiary to some public end outside the subject itself.
Non-evaluative analysis has exalted cognitive power and has brought
back into the disciplines rigour which was often lacking when profes-
sors of literature and philosophy were surrogate preachers. Although
it must be granted that non-evaluative analysts can, at their worst, fall
into the snobbishness of an impractical mandarinism, they have saved
the humanities from an empty antiquarianism. They are interested in
the understanding and mastery of literature as a living activity and in
the practice of linguistic clarity as important in the present.
Nevertheless, the consequences of this approach must be insisted
upon. Non-evaluative analysis cuts men off from openness to certain
questions. Let us imagine a student who is studying the works of Tolstoy
and de Sade under the guidance of an intelligent and sensitive practi-
tioner of non-evaluative analysis. He can be taught to understand much
about their writings, what is being said and how it is being said and the
dependence of these on very complex traditions. As in some sense both
authors are writing about the proper place of sexuality in human exist-
ence, the student can be taught to anatomize the similarities and differ-
ences in what the authors say about sexual 'values.' From such study the
student will learn what two remarkable men have thought about the
place of sexuality in human life. Yet, because the study is a non-evalua-
 The Multiversity 197

tive science, what would seem to be the most important question can-
not be raised within the study: that is, whether de Sade or Tolstoy is
nearer the truth about the proper place of sexuality. In the same way in
'philosophy' the study of ethics tells one much of how language is used
and can be used consistently in ethical discourse. But it no longer
claims to be concerned with what are the highest possibilities for men.
Such studies are impotent to lead to what was once considered (per-
haps and perhaps not naively) the crucial judgments about 'values' -
whether they are good or evil. Their scholars have gained their unas-
sailable status of mastery and self-justification by surrendering their
power to speak about questions of immediate and ultimate meaning -
indeed generally by asserting that such questions only arise through
confusion of mind. Such a position provides immunity within the aca-
demic fortress, but it can still be asked whether the impotence of mind
towards meaning is man's necessary condition.
Be that as it may, the central role of the humanities will be increas-
ingly as handmaiden to the performing arts.

When truth in science seems to teach us that we are accidental inhab-

itants of a negligible planet in the endless spaces, men are forced to
seek meaning in other ways than through the intellect. If truth leads to
meaninglessness, then men in their thirst for meaning turn to art. To
hope to find in the products of the imagination that meaning which
has been cast out of the intellect may, in the light of Socrates, be known
to be a fruitless quest. Nevertheless, it is a thirst which is the enemy of
tvrannv.

If we are to live in the modern university as free men, we must make

judgments about the essence of the university - its curriculum. If such
judgments are to be more than quibbles about detail, they must be
based on what we think human life to be, what activities serve human
fulfilment, and what place higher education should play in encourag-
ing the realization of these activities.
As soon as this is said, however, the tightness of the circle in which
men find themselves in modern civilization becomes evident. For on
one side of the picture, most men have given up not only the two great
198 Philosophy and Education

accounts of human excellence in the light of which Western men had

understood the purpose of existence (the one given in philosophy, the
other in revealed religion) but also the very idea of human existence
having a given highest purpose, and therefore an excellence which
could be known and in terms of which all our activities could be
brought into some order. It is now generally assumed that the race has
meaning (call it if you will purpose) only on the condition that we view
ourselves as purposive and that none of these views are truths concern-
ing the nature of things, but only ideologies which we create to justify
our man-made purposes. There is no objective purpose to human or
non-human nature which men can come to know and in terms of which
the various occasions of life can be ordered. Purpose and value are the
creations of human will in an essentially purposeless world.
Yet it is not simply this absence of the idea of objective human excel-
lence which constitutes the tightness of the circle in which we live. For
on the other side of the picture, it is not to be thought that just because
the dominant intellectual position of the age is that there is no highest
purpose, the public realm is in fact able to do without such a concep-
tion. The political aspect of the liberal critics of human excellence was
the belief that unfettered by 'dogmatic' and '« priori ideas of excel-
lence men would be free to make the world according to their own val-
ues and each would be able to fulfil his individuality. Ideas of purpose
and indeed of a highest activity were superstitious strait-jackets - the
enemies not only of an objective science but of the free play of individ-
uality. Their elimination through criticism was the first step towards
building a pluralist society. Yet pluralism has not been the result in
those societies where modern liberalism has prevailed. Western men
live in a society the public realm of which is dominated by a monolithic
certainty about excellence - namely that the pursuit of technological
efficiency is the chief purpose for which the community exists. When
modern liberals, positivist or existentialist, have criticized the idea of
human excellence, they may have thought that they were clearing the
ground of religious and metaphysical superstitions which stood in the
way of the liberty of the individual. Rather, they were serving the social
purpose of legitimizing the totally technological society by destroying
anything from before the age of progress which might inhibit its vic-
tory. Modern liberalism has been a superb legitimizing instrument for
the technological society, because at one and the same time it has been
able to criticize out of the popular mind the general idea of human
excellence and yet put no barrier in the way of that particular idea of
 The Multiversity 199

excellence which in fact determines the actions of the most powerful in

our society. The mark of education is claimed to be scepticism about
the highest human purposes, but in fact there is no scepticism in the
public realm about what is important to do.

The tight circle then in which we live is this: our present forms of
existence have sapped the ability to think about standards of excellence
and yet at the same time have imposed on us a standard in terms of
which the human good is monolithically asserted. Thus, the university
curriculum, by the very studies it incorporates, guarantees that there
should be no serious criticisms of itself or of the society it is shaped to
serve. We are unable seriously to judge the university without judging
its essence, the curriculum; but since we are educated in terms of that
curriculum it is guaranteed that most of us will judge it as good. The cri-
teria by which we could judge it as inadequate in principle can only be
reached by those who through some chance have moved outside the
society by memory or by thought. But so to have moved means that
one's criticism will not be taken seriously from within that society.
It would be presumptuous to end by proposing some particular ther-
apy by which we might escape from the tight circle of the modern fate.
The decisions of Western men over many centuries have made our
world too ineluctably what it is for there to be any facile exit.

It is possible, nevertheless, to assert one criterion by which all the

potential therapies may be judged. Do they mitigate the division which
comes forth from the modern vision? Do they help to overcome the way
that we envision ourselves as 'creative' freedom and all else as objects
either useful, threatening, or indifferent? In its political context that
division had led us, in our very drive to universalize freedom, to build
the acme of the objective society which increasingly stifles the sponta-
neity of those it was built to free. The division widens so that it has
almost killed what little remains of those mediators - common sense,
reverence, communities, and art (perhaps even finally sexuality) -
which are the means for us to cross the division separating ourselves
and our habitations. At any time or place it is a strange destiny to be a
'rational animal' - and indeed strange that there should be such - but
200 Philosophy and Education

the loss of these mediators makes that strangeness almost unbearable

by tearing apart that which we are - rational animals. Socrates's prayer
for the unity of the inward and the outward was spoken in an antique
world, the context of which it could not be our historical business to
recreate. Yet the fact begins to appear through the modernity which
has denied it; human excellence cannot be appropriated by those who
think of it as sustained simply in the human will, but only by those who
have glimpsed that it is sustained by all that is. Although that sustain-
ment cannot be adequately thought by us because of the fragmentation
and complexity of our historical inheritance, this is still no reason not
to open ourselves to all those occasions in which the reality of that sus-
taining makes itself present to us.

RESEARCH AND RESIGNATION

After twenty years at McMaster, Grant grew tired of fighting losing battles
against what he called 'research.' His resignation started a national controversy,
and this article in the Toronto Globe and Mail was meant to clarify what he
thought had gone wrong at research-driven universities.

The Battle between Teaching and Research (1980)

Most of us try to act from what we know or think we know. Therefore, if

we are to understand society, we must understand our educational
institutions.
In the Sixties a great change took place in the universities of Ontario.
They were expanded in numbers, size, and wealth by the government.
Like most things in Ontario, this change was initiated because of what
was happening in the United States. This change should be associated
with the name of President John F. Kennedy.
The question was asked in terms of Sputnik: Can it be possible that
American education has fallen behind that of the Soviet Union? If so, we
must immediately do something about it. Beyond this response, there

George Grant, 'The Battle between Teaching and Research,' in Globe and Mail, 28 April
1980, 7.
 Research and Resignation 201

was also the nobler positive affirmation: Let us see that everybody in
society can reach his highest potential through education; let us expand
the frontier of knowledge; let us build a noble technological society of
highly skilled specialists who are at the same time people of vision.
It came to be believed that the university would become central in
building a humane and liberated technological society. Ontario natu-
rally followed the continental pattern and established a great network
of universities.
The new university system came into existence at a time when the
account of knowledge which had dominated the Western world for
three centuries had reached its height of influence. Every civilization
has produced its own account of what constitutes knowledge, and has
been shaped by that account. Such accounts spring forth from a partic-
ular aspiration of human thought in relation to the effective means of
its realization. Our dominant account of knowledge in the West has
been positive and progressive science. The aspiration of thought from
which it sprang was, above all, the desire to overcome chance so human
beings would be the controllers of nature.
The effective condition for its realization was what we now call
research. Research is the method in which something is summoned
before the court of human reason and questioned, so we can discover
the causes for its being the way it is as an object. Research made its
appearance on the public scene of history when Galileo ran balls down
an inclined plane. Now research is applied to everything from matter to
human beings, from modern society to past societies.
The amazing achievements of research are before us in every lived
moment - in the achievements of modern medicine and communica-
tions, of modern food production, and warfare. If one ever has doubts
about the goodness of many of its achievements, it is well to remind
oneself of penicillin. It is the method of scientific research that had
made Western civilization a world civilization. It is at the heart and core
of our lives, and as such at the heart and core of our education.
Yet there are great questions which present themselves to all think-
ing human beings and which cannot be answered by the method of
research. What is justice? How do we come to know what is truly beau-
tiful? Where do we stand towards the divine? Are there things that can
be done that should not be done? One just has to formulate these ques-
tions to see they cannot be answered by research. Yet thinking people
need to be clear about such questions and therefore they cannot be
excluded from the university.
202 Philosophy and Education

Education about these questions was carried on for centuries by the

method of dialectic. Dialectic just means conversation - sustained and
disciplined conversation. It takes place between students and students,
between students and teachers. It takes place by means of the spoken
and the written word. (If one writes an essay for a teacher, one is having
a conversation with him.)
We have to talk with the great minds of the past. To think deeply
about justice requires sustained conversation with Plato and Kant. This
method of dialectic demands a different form of education from that
required when the product pursued is research. It is a much more
erotic kind of teaching than that which has to do with knowing about
objects - erotic because what is to be known about justice or God or
beauty can only be known when they are loved. This is why I have such
a sense of failure as a teacher.
The older forms of education took place in Arts faculties. But the
research paradigm of knowledge is becoming so powerful in those fac-
ulties that the tradition of dialectic is gradually being driven out.
Energetic professors soon come to know that prestige is to be gained
from research, and therefore pursue it. The reward system of the insti-
tutions teaches young professors that if they are to get on they must
produce. This not only turns them away from the business of teach-
ing, but it also turns them away from educating themselves in a
broader context. What was necessary for the traditional form of edu-
cation was to become an educated human being through a sustained
life of study.
Obviously there is need of research in the humanities. Who could
not be glad that C.N. Cochrane from Toronto wrote the great book
Christianity and Classical Culture? But Cochrane was not first and fore-
most a specialist; he was first an educated man who looked at the
ancient world from out of his long life of sustained self-education.
Of course, in the older Ontario universities such as Queen's and
Toronto, the tradition of dialectic has more continuance. This is also
true of Trent, which was modelled on the Canadian pattern of the col-
leges at Toronto. But in the universities whose ethos developed in the
1960s, the dominance of the new paradigm of knowledge becomes
stronger and stronger.
It is around this question of principle that the large influx of Ameri-
can professors into our universities should be understood. Germany
was the country where universities were first oriented around research.
American higher education was more influenced by German patterns
 Research and Resignation 203

than by any other source. Flexner is the man most associated with that
influence. On the other side, dialectical education was stronger in
England than anywhere else, largely because of the powerful influence
of Oxford and Cambridge. Canadian higher education was more
shaped before 1945 by English influences than by any other. The influx
of American professors in recent decades has brought a powerful push
toward the research-oriented university. The nature of that influence
does not turn on the particular nationality of particular people. No
decent human being should judge another solely in terms of the acci-
dent of where he was born. But the problem still remains. The influx of
American professors brought with it certain German ideas which have
greatly cut across many of our traditions.
When I was growing up in university circles in the 1930s, it was taken
for granted that Canadian universities were probably better than (at
least different from) their American counterparts. Since 1945, Cana-
dian confidence in its own traditions has continually weakened,
because of our belief that the American model is determinative.
This abstruse question of educational principle may seem far away
from the realities of life. Yet it is not. You cannot have a free and vibrant
society unless there are free and vibrant people in it. Obviously there
are large numbers of free people in Canada who have no touch with
higher education. Their freedom has other sources. Nevertheless, it is
important for the health of any society that there are people in it whose
sense of freedom is sustained by having thought in a disciplined way
about the supreme questions of human life.
When our Arts faculties are centred around research they produce a
culture which is essentially a 'museum culture.' Museums are places
where we see past life as objects - as flies in amber. We do not see them
as existences which light up our existence.
Never has so much money been spent on the organized study of the
past, and never has the past had less meaning in shaping the real life of
our present. Art arid religion and the passion for justice will continue,
but they will be more and more cut off from the rationality that the uni-
versities should offer them. Technological excellence plus museum
scholarship are not enough. When they are considered sufficient, the
mass of students will become listless. Scholarship is a means to thought,
not a substitute for it.

Simon Flexner (1863-1946), American scientist and head of the Rockefeller Founda-
tion, 1920-35.
This page intentionally left blank
 PartS
Thinking Their Thoughts
This page intentionally left blank
 PLATO (427-369 B.C.)

For Grant, Plato was a thinker much too profound merely to write about.
Through Plato's dialogues, Grant glimpsed an eternal and transcendent reality.
He gave frequent lectures and seminars on Plato and Plato's influence on
Grant's own writings ivas pervasive. It lay behind almost everything he wrote,
but was implied rather than formally stated. Grant was not an antiquarian
and he did not believe that it was sufficient merely to reconstruct Plato's
thought. He needed Plato as a guide who might help him see reality through the
mist of the modern world.

Now, in terms of an acceptance of what I take to be the Platonic position, when

one speaks of the separation of good and necessity one is speaking of that sep-
aration as it must appear to us here below. It does not imply that the order of
necessity and the order of morality do not both proceed from the Good. Pre-
sumably, the beauty of the world which is manifested both in the order of
necessity and the order of morality may to the follower of Plato teach us more
about the ultimate unity of those orders than Kant in his wonderful Critique of
judgment would say we are vouchsafed.
- George Grant to Rod Crook,* 19 July 1965

Introduction to Plato (1973) f

... Let me start with a simple remark. What I find is most perfect in
Plato is that there is a total union in his thought of what is in lesser phi-
losophers either separated or part of which is not present. That is, he
combines in a staggering unity the cosmological approach with the
ethical-religious approach. What I mean by these two is the following:
the cosmological approach is the question: 'What is the nature of the
universe - what is real and how can I know what is real?' Or, to use
other language, it puts the philosophic question as 'What general

R.K. Crook, author of a substantial review of Lament: 'Modernization and Nostalgia: A

Note on the Sociology of Pessimism,' Queen's Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3 (1966): 269-84.
unpublished lecture, 1973.
208 Thinking Their Thoughts

and universally valid conclusions about the cosmos can I draw?'

On the other hand, the ethical-religious approach starts from the
question: 'How shall I live? What is worth doing? To what shall I
pay my allegiance, my reverence? How shall I find happiness?' And
if you want, as I certainly do want, to use directly religious language,
'How can I come to know God and to be like Him, or as Plato says, His
friend?'
Now, many philosophers either concentrate on one of these sides
but not on the other, or separate them. But what happens when they
are separated?
If the cosmological is taken alone, philosophy becomes an abstract
remote discipline which has no connection with our life and our exist-
ence. And this is what has happened in an age when philosophical
analysis has become the handmaid of the natural sciences and when
philosophy becomes more and more logic and particularly the logic of
the sciences. It is against this that that wonderful philosophic move-
ment, existentialism, has made its protest. As existentialism says, I start
from my existence and try to find its meaning. It is for this reason that
Kierkegaard - that early existentialist and the first exalter of Christian-
ity against philosophy - could still have such enormous respect for
Socrates, whom he described as 'a passion of inwardness in existing,'
and we will indeed come to this when we come to discuss Phaedo next,
where Socrates talks of how he turned from the scientific philosophy
of his day to the effort to know himself.
On the other hand, if the ethical-religious sacrifices the cosmologi-
cal, philosophy is also lost, because the questions 'How shall I act?
What shall I reverence?' must be concerned with the nature of things
as they are, and the effort to know those things as they are. We can
only know how we should live if we know what kind of a universe it is.
And that is where existentialism, for example, fails. It is not concerned
with science - that is, with the desire to know systematically the nature
of things and of the cosmos as a whole.
What is so wonderful in the Platonic writings taken as a whole is the
holding together of the cosmological and systematic view of philoso-
phy with the ethical-religious view.
Now, in this class we are first of all concerned with dialogues which
clearly fall in their emphasis on the side of the ethical-religious. Partic-
ularly the Symposium and Phaedo are the dialogues of life and of death
and are passionately existential - though in them the cosmological is
 Plato 209

not far away. In the Phaedrus we are nearer the unity of the two, so we
shall study it last. But we are not studying the great cosmological dia-
logues of which the Sophist and the Parmenides are, in my opinion,
the greatest. Nor are we studying the last great dialogues in which
the cosmological and the ethical-religious are at one - the greatest of
which in my opinion is the Phikbus - that supreme philosophical
writing. Nor should we think that the immense generality of meta-
physics is higher than the practical - because the last work of Plato,
The Laws, is concerned with such concrete subjects as how much wine
a man should drink at different ages, and at what age one should
marry.
Now, I have said this to begin to talk about the Good, and to point
out that the Good as seen in the Symposium is seen as the supreme
object of desire.
But let us remember that the Good and the One are the same.
In the Republic the argument for the speculative life - the argument
from knowledge for God's existence - is combined with the argument
from desire so that the Good is not only seen (a) as the highest object
of desire, but also (b) the cause of knowing, that is, that which makes
the world intelligible and our minds intelligent, and also (c) as the
cause of being, that is, the cosmological and ethical-religious are very
closely bound together.
In the Symposium we are chiefly concerned with desire. But in
the Symposium, though what we concentrate on is desire or love, we
must always be aware that the Good is both the supreme object of
desire and of knowledge. They are at one. The One and the Good are
the same.
Let me say also that I interpret Plato as unequivocally believing
in the One or the Good as transcendent — that which is the
supreme object of our love is absent. Let me quote to you the
Republic 508-9.
To make this clear I would have to comment on Parmenides at great
length and, as that is impossible, let me only say this. What does it
mean to say that the highest object of desire and of the intellect is ulti-
mately unknowable?
Philosophers mostly agree that it belongs to the nature of mind to
seek unity. Now, they seem to disagree at this point as to the nature of
that unity - or see it from the side of desire to seek meaning.
Those who I may quickly characterize as the immanentists would say
210 Thinking Their Thoughts

- 'though it is difficult to understand what meaning the world has, we

do, however, know in principle the kind of meaning that complete
insight would reach' - though of course the immanentist would admit
that what we know in principle we cannot know in detail.
What the believer in transcendence would say is that this unity which
we seek we can neither know in principle or in detail. To put it in theo-
logical terms, God's essence is unknowable. Read Dionysius in The
Descent of the Dove, p. 61. This is the idea that the One or the Good or
God is beyond knowledge.
[half page missing]
That fundamental awareness that makes experience possible for us
is dormant, potential, and its actualization requires an external stimu-
lus. But this is only a stimulus, it does not produce that awareness. The
human soul has by nature, by being a human soul, the truth within
itself. There is a natural harmony between the human mind and every-
thing that is, between the human mind and the whole. Man has a kin-
ship with the whole, that is to say with the good of the whole, with what
makes the whole the whole. The good of the whole makes intelligible
the place which man occupies within the whole. This is the singular
dignity of man, the fact that man is a singularly privileged being, and
at the same time not the highest being, for his privileged position is
not his work but given to him. This we can say was the basis of classical
philosophy, and not only the classical, because it is of course also the
view of the Bible.

Plato and Augustine (1952^

Last summer I made a giant step forward in beginning to understand

Plato and the result has been a greater ability to think clearly. My
main difficulty was that for a long time the habits and tradition of lib-
eralism, in which (thank God) I was brought up, proved inadequate
during the war and during my time in adult education. To break loose
from a set of habits and traditions proved impossible for my tempera-
ment without a period of reaction. Luckily circumstances have given
me the chance to have time to go beyond simple reaction and come

* Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove (London: Faber and Faber 1950, 1963).
^George Grant to Margaret (Grant) Andrew, after May 1952.
 Plato 211

back to find that the basis of liberalism, if carried far enough, was the
right basis for action. In other words, what Plato is teaching me is not
that I disagree with the tradition of liberalism in which I was raised,
but that the tradition in which I was raised hadn't really sufficiently
examined itself to find on what principles it did exist.
Well, after this preliminary, an historical note. I thought it unfair in
your letter to mention T.S. Eliot and Augustine in the same connec-
tion. Eliot seems to me a quite good poet (though capable of extreme
cheapness, e.g. The Cocktail Party), but a man hardly capable of sys-
tematic thought, and one who simply accepts the Catholic position
with particular emphasis on the givenness of revelation. This is
indeed the picture of Augustine that, for differing motives, certain
Catholic and sceptical writers have put abroad. But it is an untrue pic-
ture. Augustine, for instance, said several times that the whole of
Christian truth was present in Plato and the best of the Greek philos-
ophers. In fact, the whole of his system is a defence of the unity of
reason and revelation as against the position (which one finds per-
fectly expressed by St Thomas) that there is a gulf between what we
know by our reason and what is thrust upon us (they are never clear
how) by God.
I mention this only because it seems to me that it was on the ground
of this reason that Augustine sought some measure other than conve-
nience by which to judge that thoughts were true or false, actions right
or wrong. When you say that this tradition exalts some transcendent,
unknowable power over against man, and thereby denigrates man, I
do not think that is what people who believe in the final unity of the
world are doing. It is because of the form of human life - not to escape
from the form of human life - that they say that Reason, Love - call it if
you will God — is the measure, and not the pleasure or convenience of
man. And this answer arises from two questions and two questions
alone. (1) What is knowledge? That is, what is the difference between
truth and falsehood, or, to put it better, knowledge about which we are
certain and opinion which varies from minute to minute. E.g. The
Pythagorean theorem is within certain assumptions always true, it is
knowledge; while the opinions of most Nova Scotians about politics is
not knowledge. (2) What standards can we find by which our reason
can judge whether our actions are right or wrong? That is the question
of morality. That is, the question of God's existence arises entirely
from an attempt to answer those two primary questions. What is knowl-
212 Thinking Their Thoughts

edge? What is morality? And these really boil down to one: What is the
place of reason in our lives, whether speculatively in knowledge or
practically in action?
I think the whole classical and modern tradition would here agree
that for knowledge to be possible, there must be some unity between
our minds and the external world we know, for otherwise our minds
could know nothing of the world. Yet science shows us that we do.
Therefore, the world and our minds must be at unity. So equally with
reason in action, for there to be any standards on which we can act.
Our reasons must be able to apprehend in some dim sense their place
in the order of the world. For what else is morality but fulfilling one's
proper purpose? (Of course, the place of reason in morality raises
other difficulties of a kind that do not appear in the case of knowl-
edge.)
Now here is where I think the great split comes in the history of
thought (whether classical or modern, eastern or western.) There are
those who say an immanent principle of unity is sufficient to account
for the existence of knowledge and morality (e.g. Spinoza, Hegel, and,
I think, Aristotle) while others say that the principle of unity is tran-
scendent (e.g. Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Kant). I would stand here.
Now my argument for the transcendence of unity as against its imma-
nence would be based on any number of arguments by taking the con-
tradictions between various categories and showing that they can only
be reconciled in terms of such a transcendent unity - e.g. mind and
body, universals and particulars. But finally, my chief argument against
those who find an immanent principle of unity sufficient would be that
they cannot properly account for human imperfection. If the world is a
unity in itself, why, then, is that unity broken by nearly all of us in our
actions - selfishness, ignorance, etc.? Men like Spinoza answer that, of
course it is not that human imperfection is an illusion, or, as Hegel
said, the individual evil is the universal good. But such phrases just
seem to me paradoxes, not explanations, and they still leave one with
the fact of human imperfection; and that drives one to say that the
unity of the world finally rests upon a unity which is transcendent...
Now, you may well ask with this philosophy, where does the specifi-
cally Christian tradition fit in? First and foremost, I would say that
where the Christian tradition substantiates the philosophical one is in
its greater and profounder understanding of the problem of how all
men can come to see the unity of the world and their proper partaking
 St Augustine 213

of that unity. That is the great point where I find [St] Paul sees more
deeply than Plato. How all men are within this unity and, therefore,
must freely be brought to it; and that all men learn in direct ways as
well as the inferential way and, therefore, the language of primitive
Christianity is so supremely open to all men. Of course, the greatest
symbol to any of us is another human being's life and, therefore, you
have at the centre of Christianity a symbol or image of the final unity
of the world in a concrete life through which men can come to find
that unity for themselves. This is what I think Jesus's life must have
meant to men like Paul (who must have been trained in Platonic
thought, and, for that matter, the Mosaic thought which in so many
ways is like Platonism): the giving to men in concrete pictorial way that
end or unity towards which they strive and in terms of which men
alone can find happiness, health, or call it if you will, salvation.
Now I would agree as much as anybody that the difficulty of this sym-
bolic, imaginative part of Christianity is that it so easily gets cut off
from its real basis and gets turned into a lot of nonsense that may do a
lot of people harm. I think a great deal of the Roman church's system
of rewards and punishments is just that. And, of course, at the
moment, the Christian tradition of European Protestantism is largely
worn out. What it was saying, basically, in its day was of eternal signifi-
cance, but so much of the eternal has been lost and only a weak frame
is left. But some frame has to be found both at the basic philosophical
level and at the level of corporate religious institutions that will pass on
the tradition. Tradition does not seem to me the end; it is simply a lad-
der we use when we are young and which we must finally pass beyond
as our knowledge of perfection is always greater than its incorporation
in any particular tradition. Yet because our existence is at a low level of
biology and, therefore, of continuity, we need these traditions to sus-
tain us and prevent us becoming beasts ...

ST AUGUSTINE (354-430 A.D.)

Grant was profoundly influenced by St Augustine. From family friend and Uni-
versity of Toronto classics professor Charles Cochrane (1889-1945) he learnt of
Augustine's synthesis of classical philosophy and Christianity and hence of
214 Thinking Their Thoughts

Augustine's central position in the history of Western thought. After he read

Philip Sherrard's The Greek East and the Latin West, he continued to
believe in Augustine's centrality, but he also came increasingly to think that
Augustine had been the source of certain fundamental errors that had led to the
decay of the Western tradition of Christianity and its replacement by technologi-
cal civilization.

Charles Cochrane (1954)

Profound thinking is not an activity which we associate with Canada.

Our country is certainly not organized for the encouragement of
thought. The type most typical of our early days was the pioneer and
the explorer; the type of our modern society is the engineer - business-
man - politician who pushes on at economic expansion and does not
think much beyond it. It is not surprising, therefore, that where our
economic success has been great, our spiritual contribution to human
history is almost nil.
It is therefore a great pleasure to speak about a Canadian who did
achieve greatness of the spirit in thought - indeed, who, in my opin-
ion, is the most remarkable thinker Canada has produced and as the
movement of the mind to the ultimate reality is the most important
human activity. I, therefore, place him as one of the rare men of our
country. His name was Charles Cochrane.
As is true of men who give themselves to the spirit, the externals of
Charles Cochrane's life sound commonplace enough. He was born in
western Ontario, went to the University of Toronto and then to
Oxford in England. Like so many of his generation, he was caught up
in the holocaust of the World War of 1914. Between that war and the
next big one in 1939 he taught at the University of Toronto - taught
history of Greece and Rome. He died at the end of the Second World
War.
Most people who met Charles Cochrane probably said: Here is a
pleasant professor living out his life inoffensively in a backwater of
Toronto University - quietly married, raising his children - a nice and
witty hangover from older days. Because that is what most people think

"This talk was given by George Grant in the series Anthology, broadcast on the radio sta-
tion CBL to the Trans-Canada Network, 26 October 1954.
 St Augustine 215

of classics professors - archaic survivals. During his lifetime indeed his

genius was not recognized even in the Canadian university world. Only
men of rare perception, such as Harold Innis, realized that here was
greatness. I have heard it rumoured that a university in central Canada
(I am too ashamed to mention its name) turned Cochrane down for
an honorary degree; and when one thinks of some of the people who
have received honorary degrees from that institution one is indeed left
breathless.
But, as usual, the judgment of the world was wrong, for in that seem-
ingly quiet life was going on a supreme struggle for the truth - in that
backwater the very foundations of human existence were being exam-
ined at the limits of judgment.
We know now that this was the case because in 1940 Cochrane pub-
lished a book called Christianity and Classical Culture. It is about that
book and its indubitable greatness that I want to speak this evening.
Christianity and Classical Culture is an account of the impact of Chris-
tianity on the classical world of Greece and Rome. Looked at in even a
superficial way, the story to be told is a fascinating one. The faith cen-
tred around a crucified Palestine peasant penetrated to the very centre
of the powerful and sophisticated civilization, and by doing so moved
on to dominate the early years of our civilization. The history has been
written about often, but never, in anything I have read, with the pene-
trating insight which Cochrane brings to it. For he recognized that
what happened in those first four centuries after the death of Jesus
could only be made meaningful if it was seen not simply as a battle of
organizations but as an attempt by human beings to fathom the mean-
ing of our existence. That is, he raises up the simple facts of history
into the highest questions of philosophy and theology and knows that
they can only be illumined in those terms.
What Cochrane sees in Augustus, the first Roman emperor, is the
effort to create a civilization that should be an end in itself- a commu-
nity which would be eternally safe and secure in the world. Already a
very noble civilization had been built in the Roman republic, and
Augustus hoped by creative political action to turn Rome into an ever-
lasting community in which all civilized men could cultivate the good
life. This was, of course, not only the hope of a politician such as
Augustus but was the dominant ideal of the philosophers of that time.
Their ideal was that wise men should strive to build a perfect earthly
city through political action. This ideal was incorporated in its richest
216 Thinking Their Thoughts

form in the poet Virgil. He used all the seductive power of his art to
convince men that the destiny of eternal Rome was to build this per-
fect earthly city. That is, men such as Augustus and Virgil claimed for
Rome a uniqueness and finality - that it was the incarnation of the
divine purpose in the world.
The history of Christianity is in Cochrane's eyes largely a criticism of
those claims of Rome. It was quite impossible, said the Christians, to
attain this perfection through political action and trust in political
leadership. 'To them the state, so far from being the supreme instru-
ment of human emancipation and perfectibility, was a strait-jacket to
be justified at best as a remedy for sin. To think of it otherwise they
considered the grossest of superstitions.' Against the idea of eternal
Rome - the city of the world - they raised up the city of God. A city
which could not be brought in by the superficial methods of politics,
but by the wills of men as illumined by God through the vision of the
crucified Jew.
But Cochrane sees that this difference between classical and Chris-
tian thinkers about political questions originated in a difference that
was far deeper than politics. It lay in the very difference between the
two visions of the nature and destiny of man. It lay in what Cochrane
calls the defective logic of classical naturalism - the view of man and
his place in nature constructed by classical science. What the Chris-
tians claimed was that the Roman world was defective at the very deep-
est level - the level of first principles - and what they demanded was a
revision of those first principles.
As Cochrane writes: 'The basis for such a revision they held to lie in
the meaning of Christ, conceived not as a revelation of new truth but
of eternal truth - and saw in it the illumination which would be the
basis for a new physics, a new ethic and, above all, a new logic - the
logic of human progress. In Christ, therefore, they claimed to possess
a principle of understanding superior to anything existing in the clas-
sical world. By this claim, they were prepared to stand or fall ...' They
formulated this principle in the doctrine of the Trinity which they saw
as no obscurantist mystery (as do most of our present-day theologians)
but as that in terms of which all else could be understood.
The main part of Cochrane's book is concerned with the gradual
formulation of this principle and its use as an instrument whereby to
criticize the failures of the Roman Empire as they became increas-
ingly apparent. He traces the story from the early cruder thinkers
 St Augustine 217

such as Tertullian - through the attempt of Constantine and his advi-

sors to use Christianity to buttress the empire - to its consummation
in the thought of Augustine. In Augustine the principles of Christian-
ity are laid down in a philosophic system of the first magnitude, in
which the first principle of Christ is seen in all the subtlety of its rela-
tion to every aspect of human existence - ethics and art, cosmology
and science, politics and history. The last three chapters of
Cochrane's book are just an analysis of Augustine's philosophical sys-
tem. Though it has been the practice in recent years of optimistic and
simple-minded American psychologists such as William James or Gor-
don Allport^ to berate Augustine as an abnormal personality - even a
psychotic - it is surely truer to see Augustine as one of the two or
three greatest minds in all the history of the West, and I do not know
where else the essentials of his position are as brilliantly expounded as
in Cochrane.
Of course, the story is not all of conflict between Christian and classi-
cal ideas. For, on the one hand, the Roman world was more and more
forced to turn to the Christian community for support. On the other
hand, the Christians, if they were to expound their position beyond
the barest outline, had to turn beyond the Bible to the more sophisti-
cated language of classical philosophy and in using that language the
great truths of classical philosophy were incorporated into Christianity.
That indeed is the accomplishment of Augustine, that he did not scorn
truth wherever it was to be found but took the truth of Platonism and
gave it new illumination through the light of Christ. If I have one criti-
cism to make of Cochrane it is that he draws the line between classical
and Christian philosophy too sharply. There was such a line, and a dis-
tinct one at that - but Cochrane seems to underemphasize the side of
Augustine which was ready to say that Plato, through he lived four hun-
dred years before Jesus, still knew the whole of Christian truth except
that the Word had been made flesh.
Now you may well say, yes, this is probably a very learned book about
the past, but why should it be considered so important for us who live
with our own difficulties in the twentieth century? How can a book

William James was an American psychologist and philosopher, a pragmatist who

believed that truth was measured by the extent to which it serves human freedom.
Gordon Allport was an American psychologist who argued that behaviour patterns are
set within the individual.
218 Thinking Their Thoughts

about events so many centuries ago be as important as you say it is?

The answer to that lies in the very condition of our present civilization.
It is surely true that our civilization - the civilization of the West - has
reached a point where the signs of its intellectual, religious, and moral
disintegration are present at every point. Internally we have only to
look at the breakdown of our educational and religious traditions -
our desperate trust that the problems of the human spirit can be faced
by psychological manipulation or political arrangement. Externally we
are threatened by determined opponents who, on the whole, we must
class as barbarians. What a ring the word 'twentieth century' once had
and think what it sounds like now.

The Moving Image of Eternity (1986)*

I have no doubt at all that Western Christianity made some great

errors in its origins, and here - and I say this with great hesitation,
because he is a genius - I blame St Augustine. I think it was Augustin-
ian Christianity that came in to shape both Catholicism and later Prot-
estantism, which led to this Christianity, which in turn led to this
extrheme secularized form of itself as progress. And you know I have no
doubt that Christianity is true, and I think it has to be reformulated
out of this - I think Western Christianity is, in a sense, through. And I
think that it has to be reformulated, getting rid of this Western inter-
pretation of it that led to these strange modern phenomena. I think
that this kind of Procrustean, triumphalist Christianity led Western civ-
ilization to go out into the world, thinking it could do anything to
other civilizations; and it was even more terrible when it had become
secularized Christianity.

IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)

Grant had an abiding interest in Kant's thought and taught courses on him at
both Dalhousie and McMaster. For Grant, Kant's importance lay in his under-
standing of the inwardness of morality and the importance of moral freedom.

CBC Radio Ideas broadcast.

 Immanuel Kant 219

These phenomena lay, for Grant, at the heart of the modern world and consti-
tuted great achievements and even greater dangers.

Kant and the Separation of Good and Necessity*

Does the distinction between necessity and good really lead to the fact-
value distinction?
This seems to me the question: are all dualistic ways of thought the
same?
I think we can best start from what one thinks the moral judgment
to be. My immediate difficulty is that I do not understand how Weber
analyzed the making of moral judgments. (You could help me here
with an account and with references.) I do think I understand what
Kant says. What is the difficulty in that account for me (and with as
great a thinker as Kant, one has to say that the difficulty may be that
one has not grasped the doctrine) is that I do not understand the rela-
tion between freedom and reason in his teaching. On the one hand,
the very idea of reason presents itself to us so that we know directly that
certain actions contradict that very idea. It presents itself to us in the
imperative mood; he indeed expresses that presentation with the word
Achtung.^ Yet, at the same time, we self-legislate this commanding law
of reason, and are capable of disobedience, that is, we are free in the
sense that Weber means (?). Did Weber take from Kant the idea of
freedom without the idea of reason?
As I see it, the great advantage of any dualistic system (Kant's e.g.) is
that it squarely faces the problem of suffering and does not swallow it
up in any easy explanation. By this I mean that any position must start
from a recognition that to exist is to suffer and in human terms it is to
learn that we cannot have what we want. (See Plato, Christ, Freud, etc.)
In other words, from the human standpoint the first thing a philoso-
pher must try and understand is what is the purpose (if any) in the fact
that our immediate desires are broken and trampled on from the earli-
est age. Kant's answer of duty, that is of putting aside one's immediate
desire in the name of universal purpose, seems to me a very great

Letter to Rod Crook, 19 July 1965, in George Grant: Selected Letters, ed. William Christian
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996).
Respect (German). I owe this translation to one of the University of Toronto Press's
anonymous readers.
220 Thinking Their Thoughts

answer, and, of course, puts him in some sense squarely in the Chris-
tian tradition, the overwhelming power of which was to bring suffering
into the Godhead, to be in fact the religion of slaves.
(Let me say in parenthesis that your very wise criticism of a
debauched Protestantism could, it seems to me, lead you off certain
tracks, important for the truth, if it leads you away from understanding
the strength of Christianity as the religion of suffering. For, not only
Christianity, but all the great religions, have great insights about the
negation of desire as part of the human condition.)
Of course, this account of the moral judgement for Kant had to go
with the possibility of science, and that for Kant meant a nature freed
from purpose. Therefore, reason commanded us rather than nature
giving us the law.
Now, it is at this point that I would like to write down why I cannot
give a satisfactory answer to your question. I hope that it will not simply
be of interest as my stage, but raising some important questions.
Looking back from Kant to Plato and Aristotle (for reasons part of
which will be evident in the foregoing, but part of which would take
too long in a letter) I am faced with an ambiguity. I think (but am not
sure) that there is in Plato a much greater understanding of the suffer-
ing of man than in Aristotle. The transcendence of the forms the criti-
cism of which in Aristotle is badly parroted by nearly every modern
student of philosophy with one year's training ('Plato hypostatized
concepts, etc, etc.') does appear to me very similar to Kant in the sense
that the good by which we act comes to us somehow from beyond
nature - call it if you will by that hated word supernaturally - and
demands the death of worldly desires. All the psychological or socio-
logical reductions of that position in the name of accusing it of repres-
sion, aberration and perversion does not seem to me to get around its
appeal for two reasons: (a) the meaning of the whole does not seem to
be understandable in the light of evil in an immanent way; (b) the
question of the meaning of the whole cannot easily be put aside either
existentially or scientifically.
The ambiguity this presents to me may be put historically in two
ways: (a) I am not sure I am interpreting Plato correctly; (b) I am at
last realizing that there are certain arguments on the Aristotelian side,
which I have not met and which means that I have to study at a more
than student level Aristode's Ethics and Politics.
(a) The interpretation of Plato. At the beginning of the Republic
there is the statement of Glaucon about the sufferings of the just man;
 Immanuel Kant 221

I have always taken that to be a straight affirmation of the transcen-

dence of the Good. Yet, in a recent book of Strauss's he mentions (and
he has some weight with me) that this is in Glaucon's mouth and is an
exaggeration because we must not say that absolute justice and suffer-
ing go together. I presume he is speaking as an Aristotelian and that
he implies that for them to go together would mean that there would
not be an immanent political science of A's variety and that it leads to
that sharp distinction between law and right, which is so characteristic
of Kant and indeed of Protestantism. I see the point, but consider it a
more important point to repeat that in the light of the human condi-
tion the ultimate purpose must be transcendent. In other words, the
traditional interpretation that what Plato was concerned with was the
justice of the wise man, while Aristotle was concerned with the justice
of the wise man and the natural justice of common sense, I can see.
This is, of course, very closely related to the fact that seems to me
indubitable (however one interprets the ambiguous dialogues), that
Plato differs from Aristotle in believing that theory can never be
detached from the moral life, while Aristotle affirms the independence
of theory from moral virtue. In a rather different way this same distinc-
tion seems to me possible to make between Kant and Hegel; and, of
course, I am on the Platonic and Kantian side. Why? Because I do not
think it is comprehensible that one could come to understand the ulti-
mate purpose of things except in this way; otherwise is one not shallow
about evil? A circle? Yet, at the same time I am at the moment very
much helped by the argument 'how can one have political philosophy,
if you take the Platonic side - that is, transcendence?' I would recog-
nize the terrible tendencies towards obscurantism in any doctrines of
transcendence. Yet, once again, without such a doctrine I do not see
that one is not led by the facts of evil to give up the idea of ultimate
purpose.
Now, in terms of an acceptance of what I take to be the Platonic
position, when one speaks of the separation of good and necessity one
is speaking of that separation as it must appear to us here below. It
does not imply that the order of necessity and the order of morality do
not both proceed from the Good. Presumably, the beauty of the world
which is manifested both in the order of necessity and in the order of
morality may to the follower of Plato teach us more about the ultimate
unity of those orders than Kant in his wonderful Critique of Judgment
would say we are vouchsafed. But if my interpretation of Plato is right,
he stands quite close to Kant as an agnostic. Socrates 'the philosopher
222 Thinking Their Thoughts

is the man who knows that he knows not.' Also Pascal: 'We know too
much to be sceptics; we know too little to be dogmatists.' Kant cer-
tainly says that in the preface to the 2nd edition of the 1st Critique.
Beyond this - and here I know nothing; it is evidently possible accord-
ing to the mystics to come to an understanding of the beauty of neces-
sity as we submit to its afflictions and love others who are so submitted.
But about that I must repeat that I know nothing. In my book (which
was a popular book) I make clear that I spoke simply from the position
of the person who must proceed in the practical life from the position
that the order of morality and the order of necessity cannot be known
as proceeding from the Good.

George Grant to Simone Petrement (1975)*

I make another point concerning Kant simply for the sake of interest
and in no way to take away from the genius of Simone Weil or from the
nobility of your book. Kant was the thinker who first explicitly made
the autonomy of the will central to western moral philosophy. Such a
doctrine is clearly denied in Plato and is not even present in Aristotle.
Kant says directly that Greek philosophy fails because it does not
understand the autonomy of the human will. Also I can see great con-
tradictions between Simone Weil's account of society and Kant's. Kant
is unflinchingly contractualist. As he writes in the first supplement to
Perpetual Peace. 'The problem of organizing a state, however hard it
may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intel-
ligent.' I have had to think through the basis of European contractual-
ism and its baneful results because no societies have so suffered from it
as ours in North America. Also if one takes into account Kant's contin-
ual references to his debt to Rousseau, it becomes clear that he is
entangled in all that has harmed the modern world in the conception
of 'history' and which Simone Weil has so wonderfully criticized. I take
it as a fact that the origin of the concept of 'history' is first clearly
expounded in its modern sense in the 2nd Discourse of Rousseau.
Admittedly Kant is to be preferred to Hegel who carries this way of
thinking further into that strange enquiry 'the philosophy of history.'
Nevertheless, the seeds of Hegel are already in Kant. He has journeyed
very far from Plato. Indeed The Critique of Pure Reason is dedicated to

Letter, 3 April 1975, George Grant: Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press 1996).
 Immanuel Kant 223

Francis Bacon and ends with a section entitled 'The history of pure
reason.'

Lecture (1977/8)*

Thinkers such as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume seem to be eman-

cipating human beings from the past because they turn from the eter-
nal to something immediate and ordinary - self-preservation, survival,
control of nature, etc., and this seemed an enormous emancipation
from the old tradition. But here in Kant, the emancipation is much
more fundamental than those earlier emancipations because it is not
based on something ordinary like self-preservation. It is an emancipa-
tion that deals with the highest things in human beings - morality,
freedom, etc.
This is what sometimes makes Kant difficult to understand. Because
people see that Kant is showing the absoluteness of morality as con-
trol, they do not see what a radical emancipator he is. That the very
purposes of the absolute morality are the very basis of that emancipa-
tion, which is far more radical than those of Bacon, Locke, etc.
I remember after the war being intoxicated by Kant's absolute
morality. My position, brought up as I was in liberal pragmatism,
could not go with the war. I was longing to understand the absolute,
the unconditioned, and therefore was intoxicated by Kant's account
of morality. It freed me from all the vulgar liberal pragmatism, and
this made it very difficult for me to see what a radical emancipation of
man was being stated ... the good will being the only good without
qualification.

Lecture (1977/8)f

I now see Kant as a supreme moment in defining what is in terms of

the liberation to the new freedom, which is the essential fact about
modernity; and this holds together what Kant is saying about objective
knowledge with what he says about the autonomy of the will.
Let me say categorically that to see the modern as essentially this lib-
eration for new freedom is not to affirm or deny at first whether this
liberation has been for good or ill. That is a later question ... The first

Lecture notes, McMaster University, 1977/8, George Grant personal papers, Halifax.
lbid.
224 Thinking Their Thoughts

purpose is to see what the liberation for this new freedom is. Only
when it is entirely before one could one speak about whether its
unfolding, its coming to be, has been for good or ill...
To be immediate, this says something about philosophy and life as
we have to live it. For example, in our practical life we are faced now in
every lived moment with the unfolding of that liberation to a new free-
dom. A very good example of that liberation is recombinant DNA
research. Insofar as such research is our business, then we can practi-
cally say 'no' to the unfolding of that new liberation. But to do that is a
different thing, though part of the same life, from knowing philosoph-
ically whether that liberty's unfolding is for good or ill. In short, we can
neither say that philosophy and life are separated, nor can we affirm
the unity of thought and practice ...
But what lies behind this? What was the primal affirmation from
which both Descartes and Bacon arose? Suffice it to say here that the
subject (human beings as subject) became that before which must be
led everything which is, and through which everything that is is justi-
fied for what it is. The human being (call it if you will in the generic
sense 'man') based on his own authority becomes the foundation and
the measure of all that is ... The world is represented to us as an object
that we as subjects interrogate and over which we have jurisdiction.
One must see that this is a new way of representing the world to us,
and we could see this well if we were to compare it with the older
receptive views of perception in the ancient tradition.
Modern science and morality came out of this new view of the sover-
eignty of man as subject. As I have said, the unfolding of all this, man
as subject, the world as object, is the liberation of man for a new lib-
erty. As I have also said, the fundamental basis of this human event
from which pours forth the new liberty is not clear to me, as I have
tried to say in what I wrote about in English-Speaking Justice.
But what can be seen with clarity is that the account of reason so bril-
liantly expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason, which holds the world
before itself, representing it to itself as object, which is the basis of
truth - positive truth - is the basis of the new liberty which is going to
establish its domination over the whole earth. Man establishes himself
as sovereign over the totality of all that is. What Kant says in the Critique
of Pure Reason and what he says about the autonomy of the will in the
Grundlegung are at one, as they are both man taking his fate into his
own hands. Henceforth, man sets out from himself and for himself.
It could be said at a certain level that for Kant 'to know' and 'to will'
are held apart. We are commanded to will the categorical imperative
 Immanuel Kant 225

in the midst of a world we do not know for what it is in itself (which

can only know as appearances; that is, we can only know that relation
between appearances, so that justice is something commanded us and
quite other to what we know with certainty). Yet on the other hand, it
must be said that at a deeper level 'to will' and 'to know' are not held
apart, because in the very archetype of knowing for Kant, modern sci-
ence, what is the Copernican revolution but the summonsing of
objects before vis to give us their reasons, and that summonsing makes
the very act of knowing a kind of willing. What is modern science but
an act of the subject's willing?
Now of course this understanding of the new liberty, in the sense of
an autonomous legislation on the part of humanity as the basis of
truth, first had to assert itself as liberation from the certitude of West-
ern Christianity and, because it asserted itself first against Christianity,
it seems in its expression in relation to Christianity, a relation that is
determined by itself, as rejection of Christianity. But (and this is an
enormous 'but') in looking this way we must remember that when peo-
ple talk of modernization as the transfer into the world of what is
Christian, it must be remembered that 'the world' into which Chris-
tianity is taken is something absolutely other than Christian. It is only
in the core of such a world that secularization could install itself and
develop itself. Of course, at the core of any account of truth is the
truth about justice, and the liberation of the new freedom can only
finally justify itself in terms of a new view of justice.
Now it seems to me that this is what is so fascinating about Kant. As
much as anybody, he lays before us the new essence of truth in which
humanity as subject interrogates all that is, and in which humanity
installs itself as sovereign over all that is, and in which humanity under-
stands itself as autonomous legislator to master all that is, and to enact
what the world will be like. But then at the height of that new system of
representation, namely in the question of justice, he does not cross the
Rubicon to the new account of justice that is required by the new
account of truth, proceeding from the new account of reason. He
offers the categorical imperative, that morality is the one fact of reason.
He offers a fundamental equality of persons, that is an account of jus-
tice that comes out from the older account of truth, which was based
not on the first principle of subjectivity, but on the eternal order.
In saying what I have said I do not mean in any sense to imply that I
have caught Kant out in some kind of contradiction. I think it is the
greatness of Kant that he turns back at the point of his doctrine of jus-
tice from the consequences of the modern essence of truth; and
226 Thinking Their Thoughts

indeed since his day that turning back has been a central fact of the
intellectual and practical life of the best. I tried to say in the piece I
wrote about English-speaking justice why that was for the Western
world the very incarnation of that turning back.
When Nietzsche calls Kant the great delayer, one can well reply:
Does one not want to delay the realization of the account of justice in
Nietzsche? (Not indeed that the account of justice in Nietzsche is the
perfect statement of what is implied in the modern account of the
essence of truth, but it moves in that direction.)
Why one is filled with foreboding concerning the doctrine of justice
given in the modern account of the essence of truth is of course
another question ...

KARL MARX (1818-83)

Grant's Philosophy in the Mass Age was broadcast as an experiment in the

educational use of radio, in the first CBC University of the Air radio lecture
series. The talks were an immediate hit. Grant's interpretation of Marx was
influenced by his reading of the philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse.
Grant had little sympathy for Marx's materialism. In contrast, he treated Marx
almost as a religious writer and admired him as a great social theorist who pro-
tested against the immoralities of capitalism.

As well as reading for my work I have read a life of Karl Marx with long extracts
from the writer. I find that I try to answer his questions to prove that he is
wrong. I cannot. I am not advanced enough. But, at the same time, I am posi-
tive that one cannot answer certain statements that he makes. That if one is not
prejudiced by a 'good upbringing' one must believe some of the things he says.
- George Grant to Maude Grant, 1938

Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959)

In the thought of Karl Marx the meaning of the change described in

the last chapter is brilliantly illuminated. Through his thought more
For a new edition of this work, see George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, ed. William
Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995), 49-61. Used with permission.
 Karl Marx 227

than anyone else's, the Western spirit of progress has gone out into the
countries of Asia and has become the dynamic religion of the East.
Study of this thought is, therefore, pressed upon us in the West. Yet
just as this understanding of marxism is most important to us, it has
become most difficult, because in the last decades there has been a
campaign of vilification against Marx and of suspicion of those who
study his thought in any systematic manner. He has been attacked as
the prophet of the worst abuses of the Soviet empire; as the subverter
of the achievements of capitalism; as the enemy of godliness and
morality. Although this campaign has draped itself in the flags of patri-
otism and of religion, it is not surprising that it has been inspired
largely by those whose basic interest was the maintenance of our
present property relations. [I remember when his picture was put on
the cover of Time. The resulting misrepresentation is what we have
been led to expect from Time when it wants to blacken a reputation.
The story inside was of a jealous, half-educated, ambitious and neu-
rotic man driven to his hatred of capitalism by the pain from the car-
buncles on his behind.] The contradictory nature of this attack stems
from the mixture of fear and contempt with which it has been moti-
vated. Why should the blackeners of Marx try to prevent systematic
studying of his writings, if they consider these such a jumble of non-
sense? What is especially strange in the behaviour of those who attack
Marx in this wild way is that they have generally asserted their faith in
God. Do they not believe then that this faith includes the belief that
the truth will make men free and that therefore only in careful study
can the chaff be divided from the wheat?
The contempt for Marx has not been confined to the irresponsible
rich and their demagogues. It is heard from responsible businessmen
and government officials and from their servants in the universities.
This educated contempt is more dangerous to Western interests
because it takes the form not of abuse but of patronizing aloofness.
These people claim that the important thing is Russian and Chinese
imperialism, not the spread of marxism. To those who pride themselves
on their realism, Marxism need not be taken more seriously than any
other faith. They assert that what matters is power and not ideas. This
position naturally appeals to the civil servants of Washington, London,
and Ottawa who like to be considered too sophisticated in the ways of

The material in square brackets has been restored to the published version from the
radio lectures.
228 Thinking Their Thoughts

the world to take theory seriously, and believe that history is ultimately
shaped by the ad hoc decisions that make up their lives. This supposed
realism is, however, one-sided and short-sighted. If the word power is to
mean anything, the social and ideological structure of that power must
be analyzed and understood. It is the pettiest view of human history to
believe that the intellectuals of Asia are moved by a philosophy that is
simply a tissue of wild imaginings. We must understand Marx as well as
the power of Russia and of anti-colonialism if we are to understand the
continued victories of communism in Asia. We must understand,
indeed, how much marxism has contributed to the present political
and technological power of Russian society.
It must be insisted, however, that Marx is worth studying not only
because of his influence in the history of Asia, but also because of what
he is in himself: a social theorist of the first rank, who reveals to us the
diverse currents that make up the progressivist river. Indeed, it must
be recognized that marxism is a much profounder river than the lim-
ited canals of theory dug by the officials of the Communist Party in the
East or West. As has been the inevitable fate of great prophets, his dis-
ciples have consistently neglected and misinterpreted those aspects of
his thought that did not serve their purposes. This process started even
with his intimate friend Engels, who is inclined to interpret Marx as a
disciple of Darwin. The narrowing was carried even further by such
men of action as Lenin and Stalin. Marx must be studied not so much
as a political-economic propagandist than as a theorist who brought
together the varying streams of the humanist hope and in whose syn-
thesis, therefore, the value of the doctrine of progress is most clearly
exposed to us.
Marx is essentially a philosopher of history, that is, one who believes
he knows the meaning of the historical process as a whole and derives
his view of right action therefrom. In a certain sense the philosophy of
history is the modern equivalent of what in olden days was known as
theodicy, the vindication of the divine providence in view of the exist-
ence of evil. The search for meaning becomes necessary when we are
faced with evil in all its negativity. In Marx's search the starting point
is the indubitable fact of evil. Reality is not as it ought to be. Men are
not able to live properly, because their lives are full of starvation,
exploitation, greed, the domination of one man by another. Our
present society is not such that it permits men to fulfil themselves. As
Marx says: 'Men are for other men objects.' No thinker ever had a
more passionate hatred of the evils men inflict on each other, nor a
 Karl Marx 229

greater yearning that such evils should cease. It is perhaps not surpris-
ing that he should have been so aware of evil, living as he did in the
early years of the industrial era, when new ways of work were insti-
tuted with little respect for those who did the work. What is more sur-
prising is how few of his contemporary intellectuals rebelled against
the crimes that were being committed against working men, women,
and children.
Marx proceeds from the present evil to criticism of the religious
solution of that evil. He says that the religious solution is to maintain
that all is really well, despite the evident evil. This solution has pre-
vented men from dealing with the evils of the world. The idea that
there is a God who is finally responsible holds men from taking their
responsibility sufficiently seriously. If there is going to be pie in the sky
when you die, then the evils of the world are not finally important. In
this sense, religion is the opium of the people. Religion and its hand-
maiden, traditional philosophy, have said that reconciliation can be
found in the here and now - if men will only seek God. In fact, they say
that evil is not what it seems and that despite it, all is well. But this is
not the case: all is far from well. To pretend anything else is simply to
disregard the sufferings of others. Therefore, the first function of
thought must be the destruction of the idea of God in human con-
sciousness.
As Marx wrote: 'The philosophers up to now have been concerned
with understanding the world; we are concerned with changing it.'
What he means is that the philosophers have sought the meaning
already present. They have sought God. He is not concerned with the
meaning already present; he is concerned with the creation of mean-
ing in the future by man. He is concerned with the practical overcom-
ing of the suffering he sees all around him. Therefore, man must take
his fate into his own hands and to do that he must overcome the idea
of God.
Marx's criticism of religion, however, is more profound than that of
others who have said the same thing. For he recognizes that if man is
to pass beyond belief in God, religion must not only be denied, but
also its truth must be taken up into the humanist hope. The truth of
religion for Marx was the yearning of the human spirit to overcome its
evil - or, in his language, to overcome its own alienation. By 'alien-
ation' he means that man's situation in society estranges him from the
proper fulfilment of his freedom. He has never been able to live as he
ought in society. Marx claims that he has freed this religious yearning
230 Thinking Their Thoughts

for the overcoming of evil from any supernatural connotation, and

shown how it will be fulfilled by man in history.
In the previous chapter, the centre of Biblical thought was defined
as the idea of history being the divinely-ordained process of man's sal-
vation. Marx takes over this idea of history as the sphere for the over-
coming of evil. Therefore, Christianity is for him the absolute religion,
in that as far as religion can go, Christianity takes it. The supreme
insight in Christianity, according to Marx, is the doctrine of the Incar-
nation, which means that God is no longer other to man, because he
has become man. But according to him, Christianity had never under-
stood the consequences of its own doctrine of the Incarnation. In a
world of scarcity it could only hold the idea of 'the God-man' as an
ideal once achieved, but not to be made universally concrete. It is
Marx's claim that he has taken what is true in Christianity and liber-
ated it from this limitation. He has taken the doctrine of God become
man, freed it from its other-worldly associations, and shown how it can
be universally realized in the time process. In denying supernatural
religion he believes that he has taken its truth into his philosophy.
Marx's philosophy of history is, however, not only the perfection of
humanism, because it makes the religious hope serve a humanist pur-
pose, but even more because he sees the most representative activity of
the modern world, natural science, as the chief means of conquering
evil. More than any other philosopher, he places the activity of the nat-
ural scientist in a setting of ethical redemption. Marx's recognition
that natural science is central to the humanist hope has led many sci-
entists to see the meaning of their activity in terms of marxism. Even
today in the Western world, when many scientists do not wish or do
not think it wise to espouse a systematic Marxism, their real religion
remains very much like it. To show this more fully, it is necessary first
to describe what Marx thinks is going on in history.
This can only be understood in terms of Marx's debt to German phi-
losophy in general and to the philosopher Hegel in particular.2 When
Marx is thinking about history, he is thinking in Hegelian terms. His-
tory is the sphere in which spirit is realizing itself in the world. It is real-
izing itself always in relation to nature. Here appears the distinction
between spirit and nature. Nature is what it is and is not what it is not.
A stone is a stone and not something else. But man is self-conscious,
and self-consciousness is divided against itself. Man can always stand
above himself and make himself what he is not. Every action is a
project to the future, in which we negate what we are now. Therefore,
 Karl Marx 231

man both is and is not what he is. Spirit, then, has a different logic
from the logic of identity proper to nature. History is the coming to be
of spirit in the world. Marx takes over this Hegelian way of thought,
and limits it by finding the whole meaning of history in the relation of
human freedom to nature. There is for him no nature without human
significance; there is no significance to human freedom apart from the
domination of nature. 3 To Marx, therefore, the way that men have
organized their economic relations is the key to history. In the eco-
nomic organization that expresses our relation to nature, he sees the
cause of human evil in the past; in the creation of a new relation he
sees the overcoming of that evil.
To state this in more detail: from the earliest days of history, men
found themselves in a position of scarcity. There was just not enough
food, shelter, and clothing for everybody to have an abundance.
Because of this a society of class dominance was necessary. A minority
group in society gained control of the economic life, the means of pro-
duction. And as they controlled the means upon which everybody
depended for sustaining life, they controlled society as a whole, and set
the pattern of its government, its art, its religion, its morality. In other
words, in a world of scarcity, society was necessarily divided into classes.
Class in Marx is defined in a strictly economic sense, in relation to con-
trol or lack of control over the means of production.
This division of society has meant class struggle between those who
wanted to maintain their control over the source of wealth and their
consequent position of privilege, and the majority, who were excluded
from that control. But at the same time as one dominant class has
been imposing its control over society through its control of the
means of production, people have also been seeking greater power
over nature through technology, and therefore introducing new forms
of social wealth. This continually changing relation of men to nature
has prevented any one class from long being able to impose its domi-
nance over the means of production, and so over society as a whole.
The new forms of wealth have produced new classes to challenge the
power of the old rulers. For example, in medieval society the means of
production were chiefly land, and therefore the ruling class was the
landlords. But as there came to be more and more commerce and sim-
ple manufacturing, the new middle class arose in the new towns. This
class challenged the power of the landowners. The times of quick and
radical change in history have been when a new class, produced by
new economic conditions, has come to sufficient power to challenge
232 Thinking Their Thoughts

the old ruling class, which in turn does all it can to retain its dying
supremacy.
Marx also believed that as man's control over nature becomes more
complete, so the dominant classes who come to power progressively
serve a more universal interest of mankind. They serve the gradual
emergence of freedom in the world. In the modern era it has been the
historic role of the capitalists and their capitalist society to bring tech-
nology and economic organization to the point where, ideally, the
conditions of scarcity might be once and for all overcome. The
achievement of the capitalists has been to destroy the old natural
world in which human freedom could not come to be. They have ratio-
nalized society.
At the same time, however, as capitalist society has created the con-
ditions of liberation, it has intensified the conditions of enslavement.
The very form that the ownership of the means of production takes in
capitalism sharpens the class struggle to its peak. For as capitalism
solidifies, it moves, because of the profit motive, to the concentration
of economic control into fewer and fewer hands. The mass of mankind
are cut off from control over the conditions of their own work as they
are cut off from any control over the means of production. The contra-
diction that capitalist society creates is that it has produced the possi-
bility of overcoming scarcity - that is, the conditions for overcoming
class dominance and inequality have arrived; yet at the same time it has
chained the mass of men to uncreative labour, work for which they
have no responsibility. It has taken to the extreme the division between
the owners of the economic apparatus and servants of that apparatus.
In such a situation where liberation is possible and where alienation is
actual, there can be only one result. The mass of men will not allow
themselves to be excluded from the liberation that technology has now
opened for them. They will take the means of production out of pri-
vate control and place them under social control. They will destroy
capitalism and create socialism. In this new society the basic cause of
evil will be overcome. Men will no longer be for each other objects of
economic exploitation. Human beings will be able to give themselves
over to the free play of their faculties, to the life of love and art and
thought.
The mass of people who are increasingly separated from control
over their own work and over the economic apparatus as a whole,
Marx calls the proletariat. Few conceptions in Marx generate so much
confusion. People think that the proletariat means the hungry, the
 Karl Marx 233

ragged, the destitute. As today in North America there are not many
people who are destitute, the inference is drawn that Marx has been
proven wrong about capitalism. Of course, Marx hated the grinding
poverty and the degrading division between physical and intellectual
work that characterized the capitalism of his day. He said that indus-
trial workers were turned into the living counterparts of a dead mecha-
nism. But the idea of destitution is not necessary to the idea of the
proletariat. The proletariat consists of those who have no creative
responsibility for the society through their work, because they do not
own the means of production with which they have to work. They are
employees serving the private interests of their employers. For Marx,
the proletariat is not one class amongst other classes, one class against
other classes. It is the universal condition in which the vast majority of
men find themselves in the age of the machine, when the machines
and the machines that make machines serve private interests. The pro-
letariat cannot liberate itself by producing another class society, but
only by destroying the very existence of economic classes themselves.
The mass of society are driven to recognize that in a machine age all
work is social and rational and that therefore what must be created is
an appropriate economic apparatus, not one given over to the irratio-
nal ends of private profit.
Those people who first become conscious that this is the historical
position of the age will become the leaders of that liberation, the pro-
letariat conscious-of-itself. They are the Communist Party, the party
that will direct the bringing in of a classless society of equality. Thus,
the sufferings of the proletariat are seen as the Christian sees the pas-
sion of Christ, necessary to the redemption of mankind. It is this idea
(at some level of explicitness) that has enabled countless ordinary peo-
ple to endure suffering - with such high fortitude - for the sake of the
communist cause. The suffering is seen as meaningful.
It is not possible to assess here this remarkable vision of human his-
tory. There are many things to be said about it both as economic and
philosophic doctrine. For instance, to assess it as an economic doctrine
it would be necessary to discuss its dependence on the labour theory of
value; to assess it as a philosophic doctrine, discussion of the causes of
human evil would have to be introduced. Nor is it possible to describe
the development of marxist doctrine in the last century or the ques-
tion of how far the Russian Revolution and the consequent regime of
the Soviet Union can be said to be the socialist society of which Marx
was talking. It is, for instance, arguable that it is with us in North Amer-
234 Thinking Their Thoughts

ica that the conditions that Marx prophesied are most clearly fulfilled,
and therefore Marx is more the prophet of North America than of
Russia. These are intricate questions to which no short answer can be
given.
What must be insisted on, however, is that Marx's philosophy has
been the most powerful of modern humanisms, for two reasons above
all. First, it was a humanism of universal salvation, and secondly, it
seemed very concrete and practical about the means to that salvation.
With regard to the first point: the marxist hope is not for the isolated
individual but for society as a whole. His humanism is not for a few
rare, fine spirits in exceptional positions, but promises the good life
for all. So often humanist liberalism has been made ridiculous by its
individualism that disregarded the dependence of the individual on
the community, and seemed little concerned with the way the mass of
men lived. But how can the human spirit find any moral fulfilment in
such individualism? There can be no perfected freedom in a world
where others have not found it. What kind of a heaven can be enjoyed
while others are in hell? The power of marxism has lain in the fact that
it foretold a concrete overcoming of evil in the world, which would be
for society as a whole. Here Marx's dependence on the Judaeo-Chris-
tian idea of history is obvious. His humanism retains the idea of history
as salvation, but rejects its theological framework. This makes it incom-
parably more powerful than those humanisms that are liberal and indi-
vidualistic.
The second reason for the power of marxism is its claimed practical-
ity. Instead of leaving the worldly hope up in the air, it describes in
concrete how it is to be brought about. It relates its achievement to the
forces already around us in modern society. There is much that could
be said about the superiority of marxism over other doctrines of
progress, on account of its direct application to the world as it is, but I
will single out one connection - the significance Marx gave to the nat-
ural scientists.
The fact to be explained is why many scientists in this century have
been followers of Marx or have been deeply influenced by him.
Because governments must concern themselves with treason, this fact
has been surrounded with a miasma of anxiety in the last years. But the
first problem is to give a serious explanation of why it has been so. The
answer is surely this: marxism gave so satisfactory an account of science
as essentially an ethical, indeed a redemptive activity, the means by
which men were to be freed from the evils of pain and work.
 Karl Marx 235

Recently there was a syndicated American cartoon in our local

paper. It was a drawing of a Russian commissar-for-foreign-aid speak-
ing to a young student whom he wishes to send abroad on a technical
mission. The commissar is saying: 'I don't care about your engineering
degree, what do you know of Karl Marx?' Obviously this cartoon
expresses the great need the Americans have these days to keep alive
their sense of superiority over the Russians. What the cartoon says is
this: we Americans are interested in helping under-developed coun-
tries quite honestly by giving them engineers; the Russians are not
really interested in helping people through engineering but in domi-
nating them through marxism.
This is to misrepresent entirely what marxism is and the hope that
men see in it. The philosophy of marxism is regarded as the guide and
control under which modern techniques can be brought to under-
developed countries, and it claims that it alone can guarantee that
these modern techniques will be the servant of the good of all and not
of private profit. Marx's appeal was not to the scientist as an ethical
man apart from his function, but primarily in his function itself. Scien-
tists, like other men of intelligence, want to know what purpose their
activity is serving. Marx gave them a systematic answer to this question.
He showed (whether accurately or not) the role of the scientific func-
tion within an optimistic and worldly philosophy of history, which had
place for the universal interests of humanity.
It may be said by way of digression that it was often a contradictory
tendency in Marx that made his philosophy so powerful among certain
scientists. Among modern scientists there have been two ways of look-
ing at man that have been difficult to relate. On the one hand, assump-
tions from geological and biological studies have led certain scientists
to judge man as but a product of nature. They have believed that his-
tory is but a part of nature. On the other hand, science as technology
has been obviously the victory of human freedom over nature, which
means that nature has been taken up into history. Many scientists have
held both these views at the same time - as theoretical men they have
often asserted that their science shows that man is but a product of
nature; as practical men they have asserted that science is the domina-
tion of man over nature. It may be that some scientists have been
adherents of Marx because his thought seemed to hold these positions
together. His materialism seemed to make man simply a part of
nature; his dialectic to make man firmly the master of nature. Thus the
marxist could have the best of two worlds.
236 Thinking Their Thoughts

But leaving aside this digression, what is important is that marxism

seemed to be tied to what was already in the world - the everyday world
of technology and mass industry that surrounds us. He seemed to show
men that through the present conditions of society the humanist Uto-
pia could be achieved and progress brought to its consummation. His
Utopia did not therefore seem an airy ideal, but something concrete, a
possibility to be actualized in terms of what already existed. This is what
has made marxism the most influential humanist religion the world has
ever known. It is this that gives it its power over the East.

NOTES

1 The difficulty of studying Marx in his own writings must be emphasized. His
master work, Capital, consciously imitates the structure of Hegel's Logic, with
its scheme of being, essence, and idea. Also, some of Marx's profoundest
thought is to be found in his early writings which are not easily available in
English. For instance, his philosophy of history begins to take shape in a
magazine article protesting a German law which penalized the collection of
firewood by the poor. The reader is therefore advised to approach the study
of Marx through such modern commentaries as A. Cornu's K. Marx etF.
Engels, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1955), vol 2 (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France 1958), andj. Hyppolite's Etudes sur Marx et
Hegel (Paris: Riviere 1955).
2 It is difficult for English-speaking peoples to admit the spiritual greatness of
the Germans. In our last two wars we have been taught to despise their civili-
zation. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the highest European achieve-
ments in music and philosophy have come from the Germans. Indeed, the
ambiguity of German history is that these people have been capable of the
most appalling evil, but also of the highest reaches of the human spirit. In
Western philosophy, for instance, two periods of thought stand out as the
most brilliant: the fourth century B.C. in Greece, which we associate with
Plato and Aristotle, and the late eighteenth century in Germany, whose mas-
ters were Kant and Hegel. There are no more remarkable books on human
history than Hegel's Philosophy of History and his Phenomenology of Mind. Marx
is the heir to this tradition of German philosophical genius. I write about
Marx in these essays because his thought is the most influential way that Ger-
man philosophy has gone out into the world, but under his thought at every
point lies the much profounder genius of Hegel.
 Simone Weil 237

3 I need hardly stress what a different view this is of man and nature, and their
relationship, compared with the Greek view of natural law.

SIMONE WEIL (1909-43)

Simone Weil was a French philosopher whom Grant admired more than any
other contemporary thinker because she combined philosophic thought of the
highest order with a life of saint-like denial and asceticism. Born into a secu-
lar Jewish family in Paris, she received an elite French education and worked
for a while as a schoolteacher. However; after the German invasion of France,
she was forced to flee, first to the south of France, then to New York, and
finally to London, where she worked for the Free French. She published littte
during her lifetime, but the posthumous publication of her notebooks estab-
lished her as one of the leading philosophical and religious thinkers of the
twentieth century. Grant was deeply influenced by her from the 1950s and his
last great work, 'Faith and the Multiversity,' shows how much he had learned
from meditating on her writings for over thirty years. Grant did not consider
the writings reprinted here to be anything more than an invitation to read
Weil herself.

Let me say also that although my debt to Strauss is great as a teacher of what
makes up modernity, Simone Weil is the being whose thought is to me the
enrapturing. It is indeed true that I am scared of her because the unequivocal
saints are scaring to somebody like myself who loves comfortable self-preserva-
tion, but nevertheless her thought is next to the Gospels the highest authority
for me. Quite a different level of authority from Strauss. I can imagine being
capable of writing something as perceptive & lucid as Strauss, but I cannot
imagine loving God & being possessed by Christ as S.W. was. That is why I
write of the same questions as Strauss and do not write of S.W. because she
was divinely inspired and one can only approach that with fearful hesitation.
She can be wrong about little scholarly details in a way that Strauss would not
be, but on the greatest matters in the last years, she is writing out of the
extraordinary event of being possessed by the second person (??) of the Trin-
ity. If I can ever become quite a different person, I might be able to write
something about her, other than just pointing to her writings.
- George Grant to Joan O'Donovan, 19 January 1981
238 Thinking Their Thoughts

Introduction to Simone Weil (1970)*

There must always be something unsatisfactory in writing or speaking

about the productions of the great. For example, musicologists can
write of Mozart's mastery of certain forms, his use of certain keys, his
debt in the later part of his life to the Bachs, etc., etc.; but finally they
must simply say - listen, be silent, pay attention, study - here one is in
the presence of the highest. Indeed, much of the attitude of the expos-
itor should be that of John the Baptist as depicted by Grunewald in the
Isenheim altar. ^ As you will remember, he stands there pointing at the
figure on the cross.
So it must be in speaking of the life and writings of Simone Weil. My
muddy and confused words seem so tedious compared with the cutting
clarity of her language.
Of course, to the young one must do a medium amount of talking so
that they do not miss their encounters with the great - those sudden
encounters which are the joy of education - and this talking has a par-
ticular use in a society in which the tawdry is all around them. There is,
however, more reason to talk of a recent genius than an ancient one,
because many people may not have read her works. Simone Weil died
in 1943 and the twenty-seven years since then have been wordy and
noisy ones, particularly here in North America. Ours is not an era in
which the note of genius is heard through the avalanches of print, and
this applies particularly to the genius of sanctity. There is, therefore,
perhaps some purpose served in speaking of Simone Weil. But I must
insist that my purpose is not to interpret her thought for you — that is,
to put my own clumsy self between you and her, but rather to persuade
you to read her works, and to pay attention to her genius. My paper is
meant as an introduction to the reading of Simone Weil — to discover
her life and her writings.
First, let me sketch the outward going of her existence. Simone Weil
was born in Paris in 1909. Her parents were prosperous French who
had come from the tradition of European Judaism. She had one older
brother who is today a famous mathematician. She was brought up by
her parents and brother in that civilized humanist agnosticism of the
enlightenment, which so characterized middle-class European culture

George Grant, a speech given to the Hamilton Association r. 1970, unpublished.

Matthias Grunewald, active between 1500 and 1520, the last and one of the greatest
painters of the German Gothic school.
 Simone Weil 239

before 1914. But it was that culture in its finest form. Whatever else she
was to become, it must be remembered that she partook of two
remarkable traditions; both her Frenchness and her secularized Jew-
ishness gave her that intense love of learning and cultivation of the
intellect, which may not of themselves be enough, but are the seed-
ground from which even higher activities can proceed, and without
which society and individuals are likely to become mediocre or even
base. French education for the very clever is prodigiously difficult and
highly competitive. Her achievement is therefore remarkable in taking
her baccalaureate at the age of fifteen (the usual age being seventeen
or eighteen) and in receiving the mark of nineteen out of twenty,
when the usual youngster considers fifteen a high mark. She pro-
ceeded to the lycee and the College Henri IV and on to the Ecole
Normale Superieure. Alain, the famous teacher of philosophy, con-
sidered that she had philosophic genius of the first order. That is, in a
country where the achievement of the elite was the best the West has
produced, she was known as having shining intellectual eminence.
There is in her, however, from the beginning, something beyond
the pattern of French brilliance, or for that matter beyond any intellec-
tual brilliance. No sooner had she become a teacher of philosophy
than she became part of a group of workers who produced a paper
called The Proletarian Revolution, and soon after she took leave of philo-
sophical teaching and became a worker in the Renault motor works.
The best comment on that life is what she wrote later to her friend,
Father Perrin; 'What I went through (in the factory) marked me in so
lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he
may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality,
I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and
that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I
received for ever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot
iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised
slaves.'
In 1931 and 1932 she had been in Germany, and writing (at the age
of twenty-one) in the proletarian magazine she made clear the reasons
for the inevitable fact that the Nazis must win the struggle for power -
as in fact they did a year later. In 1936 she went to Spain to work for the
Republican army on the Catalonian front and experienced war in its

Emile Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), French philosopher and one of the most impor-
tant earlv influences on Weil's thought.
240 Thinking Their Thoughts

savagery. In 1937 her parents moved in and took her out of the public
world, as by this time she was physically broken and was to suffer for
the rest of her life from that hideous curse, migraine.
With the fall of Paris to the Germans in 1940 she moved to unoccu-
pied France, working as a farm labourer for twelve hours a day and con-
tinuing her studies in Greek and Sanskrit. She was later involved in
clandestine activities. In 1942 she was persuaded to move to New York by
her parents, who as Jews obviously had to emigrate. But the six months
in New York she considered a mistake, and immediately began to pester
her friends who were high officials in General de Gaulle's entourage to
send her on some mission to France. She was brought to London in
December 1942 but her obviously Jewish physique and the brokenness
of her health would not allow the officials to send her into France. She
worked in London on reports about the kind of society which should be
established in France after the war. One of her greatest writings, The
Theory of the Sacraments, was a private letter to Maurice Schumann, now
Foreign Secretary. In the spring of 1943 she was in hospital, and dead in
August 1943. Cause of death listed as 'suicide, not eating.'
This capsuled account of her life sounds singularly uninspiring, and
my failure saddens me. I now must turn to that aspect of her life which
is even harder to describe than outward events - what I would call the
possession and distinction of her existence by God. This difficult sub-
ject cannot be avoided because it is in this fact that the greatness of her
writings can only be understood. What gives her writings their startling
force is that she writes of the divine (call it, if you will, reality) with an
immediacy, certainty, and directness. Let me explain what I mean by
this quality of her writings by making a comparison between two writ-
ers of our era. Both people like Masters^ in his reports and D.H.
Lawrence* in his novels write of sexuality. Masters from his science
knows a lot about the outlets and climaxes of American men and
women. But he clearly knew almost nothing about human sexuality in
itself. Can anybody imagine going to Masters to deepen their con-
sciousness about the place of sexuality in their own life? The very idea
is high comedy. Lawrence, on the other hand, knows what sexuality is

Maurice Schumann (1911-), the chief official broadcaster on the BBC French service
during the Second World War.
W.J. Masters and his wife A.E.Johnson published a landmark study of sexuality, Human
Sexual Response (1966).
D.H. Lawrence's (1885—1930) most famous novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), was
banned in both Great Britain and the United States as pornographic.
 Simone Weil 241

because he has existed as a sexual being and knew others who have
also so existed. My analogy is that Simone Weil writes about the divine
like Lawrence, not like Masters.
It is therefore necessary for me to say something of those events
between 1936 and 1943 whereby God's perfection became immediate
to her. (And I use the word 'immediate' in the sense that we see each
other right now.) But let me say that in doing so I have very great hesi-
tation - and would like to cover my head with a cloth as Socrates did
when he spoke with Phaedrus about most difficult matters. Let me
begin by quoting her words which set the context of the problem:

I may say that never at any moment in my life have I sought for God - I do
not like this expression and it strikes me as false. As soon as I reached
adolescence I saw the problem of God as a problem of which the data
could not be obtained here below, and I decided that the only way of
being sure not to reach a wrong solution, which seemed to me the great-
est possible evil, was to leave it alone. So I left it alone. I neither affirmed
nor denied anything. It seemed to me useless to solve the problem, for I
thought that being in this world, our business was to adopt the best atti-
tude with regard to the problems of this world.

Let me read you one extract about these events. In doing so one
must remember it is part of an account written to an intimate friend
which she never thought would pass beyond him.

In 1937 I had two marvellous days at Assisi. There, alone in the little
twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an
incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray,
something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life
to go down on my knees.
In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tues-
day, following all the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting
headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of atten-
tion I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, and leave it to suffer by
itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the
unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience
enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of
loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in
the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered
into my being once and for all.
242 Thinking Their Thoughts

There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first
idea of the supernatural power of the Sacraments because of the truly
angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to com-
munion. Chance - for I always prefer saying chance rather than Provi-
dence - made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence
of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named meta-
physical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read
you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called Love. I
learnt it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I
make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and cling-
ing with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was
merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the reci-
tation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations
that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.
In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had
never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person,
here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of
things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Fioretti the
accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything, like the miracles in
the Gospel. Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither
my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my
suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile
on a beloved face.
I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to
read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to practise
obedience. There is nothing more favourable to intellectual progress, for
as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for, at the moment when I
have the appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. God in his mercy
had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident
to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.
Yet I still half refused, not my love but my intelligence. For it seemed to
me certain, and I still think so to-day, that one can never wrestle enough
with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to
prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns
aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling
into his arms.

Such events cannot, of course, be spoken of simply. For instance,

her involvement in the twentieth century through becoming a mem-
ber of the industrial proletariat and through experience of war, shows
 Simone Weil 243

that there was in her something beyond intellectual brilliance, namely

what in the West is called attention of the will, or better, love and
which has always been considered necessary to the highest knowledge.
This already present attention was what led her to the afflictions of the
century, even before she knew what she was doing, and in turn the
afflictions are the condition of her amazing attention. Moreover, the
afflictions of modern civilization taught her to question the philo-
sophic principles on which modern civilization is based, and so
enabled her to read and participate directly in what the Greeks and
Indians have said about alternative principles, in a way that is quite
impossible for most of us. Yet, in saying that her involvement in the
afflictions of the world is central to the understanding of her sanctity,
we must avoid being led to that anti-intellectual position which sees
possession by deity as an happening which has little to do with intellec-
tual life. (This I may say is a position very popular in many circles these
days.) For it is perfectly clear from her own testimony that her reading
of the Bhagavadgita, the Iliad, and above all Plato and the Gospels
were the very means of her receptivity. What I am saying is, in its most
general form, the following: in the tradition, and I can only speak of
the Western, there has been much controversy about the respective
places of the way of love arid the way of knowledge, and indeed some
followers of the way of love have been so presumptuous as to ridicule
thought. This is not true of Simone Weil. In her the ways of love and of
knowledge are inextricably bound together. It is particularly necessary
to say this in our present society in which knowledge and love are so
disastrously bifurcated that each falls into its own particular errors and
perversions.
What is one to make of such a sentence as: 'It was during one of
these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took
possession of me.' I, of course, believe that what happened is exactly
what she says happened. And yet this seems to me highly surprising;
for I do riot like or trust the writings of most mystics and am full of sus-
picion of their claims. Also, as a twentieth-century person, I am
inclined to a certain image of the relation of sexuality to religion and
therefore such language as Christ taking possession of people is highly
suspect - particularly from women. Yet I am sure it happened for the
reason that what she knows and writes about elsewhere is, I am sure,
true, and whatever her faults I cannot think they were those of self-
delusion. This comment is of course in no sense a proof because I
could not prove it unless someone would sit down and read in detail
244 Thinking Their Thoughts

and discuss with me in detail what she has said about affliction and the
beauty of the world in her notebooks. Let me also say that I think that
official, institutional Christianity has been quite right in being so
firmly suspicious of those claims to direct contact which we call mysti-
cism, because of the obvious and manifold abuses to which they may
lead. But when it happens, I am sure it happens, and I am convinced it
happened here.
To turn from these absurd little comments of mine, I will now
describe her published writings. First, I must mention several compli-
cations in sorting them out, which make it difficult to approach her
thought at all or to understand it as a consistent whole. These stem
from the fact that the most important of her writings were written in
notebooks for her own purposes, not those of publication, and have
only seen the light of published day since her death and under the edi-
torial hands of other people. The comparison can be made between
her writings and Pascal's Pensees. After 1945 her friends in the south of
France, Monsieur Gustave Thibon and Father Perrin, published some
of the manuscripts she had left in their hands. Thibon produced Grav-
ity and Grace, a set of extracts from her notebooks; Perrin, Waiting on
God, which are her letters to him and certain of her essays. These pub-
lications by her Catholic friends presented a particular difficulty.
When they appeared in France they were met by the highest adulation.
French writers of all kinds - whether believers or not - heralded them
as the work of genius. In this fact Catholics were faced with an inevita-
ble ambiguity. Here was a writer of clear genius and one who had
entered the heights of the Christian life, and yet who had unequivo-
cally and at great length stated that obedience did not call her to mem-
bership in the Catholic Church - indeed one who had written
penetrating attacks on the form of the Church and some of its most
authoritative teaching.
She remained, she has told us, at the intersection of Christianity and
everything that is not Christianity: all the ancient wisdom of mankind
of the Enlightenment that the Church had repudiated and excluded,
the traditions banned as heretical, even the limited goods that resulted
from what we hypostatize of the Renaissance. T remain beside them all
the more,' she wrote to Father Perrin, 'because my own intelligence is
numbered among them.' In her eyes the Church fails as a perfect
incarnation of Christianity mainly because it is not truly Catholic. 'So
many things are outside it - so many things that God loves - Christian-
ity being Catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on
 Simone Weil 245

my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not

only for a time but for my whole life if need be.'
This may sound as if she were advocating a foolish syncretism or
asserting the Church should embrace falsehood as well as truth. But,
of course, politically she was in no sense a liberal (that is, an optimist
about the results of falsehood) and so she recognizes the Church's
duty to guard the truth and warn the public against error. But this
guarding has been done in the wrong way by the use of force and
anathema. This rejection of the Church meant that she excluded her-
self from the Eucharist which she knew to be a priceless treasure.
Now clearly it is difficult (I do not know whether it be possible) for a
Roman Catholic to accept at its face value Simone Weil's position that
it is Christ who demands for her the obedience of remaining outside
the Church. It would be folly to say impossible considering the river of
divine charity which in the last years has flowed from the Roman Cath-
olic Church, which must make the rest of us humble. The alternative is
to say that at the centre of her existence she has been in some way mis-
taken; she confused obedience with spiritual pride and Cardinal
Danielou has said that. It is quite honest to interpret her this way and
in the last years there have been many books by Roman Catholic theo-
logians explaining the sources of her errors. My point about her writ-
ings is it is quite evident that the extracts published by Thibon were
affected by the contradiction on the one hand of his friendship and
admiration for her, on the other the desire to play down her total
thought. Obedience to their Church meant that M. Thibon and Father
Perrin could not be expected to edit her manifold manuscripts prop-
erly. There were too many passages to which they were entirely unsym-
pathetic. Nevertheless, the effect of their early editing on her public
image still remains. Thibon's Gravity and Grace was the chief way her
writings became known in English, and it is a very one-sided set of
extracts. Father Perrin's book, Waiting on God, is fairer, and is indeed a
good first volume to read (also cheaply available in English.) However,
it must be noted that Father Perrin's introduction to that book has
been withdrawn, and he has published elsewhere a more cautious and
less enthusiastic account of her.
Now that her manuscripts are edited, not as extracts, but more in
the way she left them, the central difficulty remains, however, of seeing
her thought in unity, because her main writings were not intended for
publication. This unification of her thought is further complicated by
the fact that for a person who died at thirty-three, and spent most of
246 Thinking Their Thoughts

her adult life as a labourer, her writings are voluminous. Since the end
of the war this immense mass of material has been brought out by the
French presses. Let me say that many of the theologians who have writ-
ten books or articles about her have singled out certain aspects of her
thought at the expense of others and therefore have interpreted her
totality in a very limited way. Some of the descriptions of her in Ameri-
can journals could only have been written by people whose reading
had been to say the least partial. There is such a desire on the part of
scholars these days to get into print that they sometimes write about
that of which they do not know enough.
For the sake of clarity I will divide her writings into two main classes:
her political and social writings and her philosophical, scientific, and
religious writings. Obviously this division is arbitrary because each
depends on the other.
There are three main books about politics and society. First, L'Enra-
cinement (The Need for Roots). (In giving an English title, I am not imply-
ing any lack of French in my audience, but simply stating that there is
an English translation of the work. Where there is no translation I will
give only one title.) This is the only book that she wrote for a public
purpose — indeed her only book which is not a collection of pieces. It
was written as a report for the Free French government in London as
to the principles on which French society should be based after the
war. It is divided into three sections: (a) the needs of the soul in any
society, (b) the cause of modern uprootedness, and (c) the possibility
of enrootedness in advanced industrial society. By 'uprootedness' she
means what Marx means by alienation, but uses it in a wider context
because she has a fuller understanding than him of the demonic
aspects of bureaucracy. This is the least absolute of her books
because it was written as a report to practical men, who knew they
would soon have responsibility for the reconstruction of a conquered
society. Second, Oppression et Liberte (Oppression and Liberty). This group
of essays is in my opinion her most remarkable writing about politics,
and is a good place to start the study of her thought. Albert Camus
also thought it was one of the masterpieces of European political phi-
losophy. At its centre is a long essay called 'Reflections on the causes
of liberty and social oppression,' which is at base an understanding
not only of the causes of social oppression in general, but of the par-
ticular forms of oppression which arise in societies which are oriented
to the future, that is, which are progressive. This volume also con-
tains her amazing critique of marxism. I must emphasize that this crit-
 Simone Weil 247

icism of Marx is not of the order of those we have got used to in

North America since 1945 - criticisms which miss the point because
they distort Marx and therefore do not come to grips with his
thought. Simone Weil has a profound understanding of Marx's great-
ness and therefore what she says is truly a critique, not the passing
wind of propaganda. Third, La Condition Ouvriere. At the centre of this
volume is her diary while she worked for the Renault factory. This is,
however, no personal affair but comments about the relations
between men and machines and men and bureaucracy. It also con-
tains an essay on the conditions necessary if industrial work is not to
be servile.
Besides these three mains works there are two volumes of miscella-
neous essays on social and political subjects, ranging from several anal-
yses of French colonial policy to essays on the Cathar religion and the
civilization of Languedoc, that is, the Albigensians. Two of these essays
I would particularly single out. A long essay called 'Reflections on the
origins of Hitlerism' turns out to be a sustained and detailed criticism
of the civilization of Rome. I single this out not only because it helps us
escape some of the more comfortable platitudes about Roman history,
but because in it is expressed her central theme about history in gen-
eral - namely that the nobler and better does not necessarily survive,
indeed because of the ultimate rule of force over the world, truth and
beauty can only be tenuously held in the being of any society. She
agrees with Plato that society is always and everywhere the Great Beast
or the Cave. The other essay I would single out is 'The Person and the
Sacred' in which she maintains that what is sacred in man is not what is
individual or personal but what is impersonal. Seen negatively, this
essay is an attack on so much popular modern writing, both inside and
outside Christianity, which is based on a sentimentalizing of personal-
ity and mankind. These essays have been published in English by the
Oxford Press under the editorship of Sir Richard Rees, who is the lead-
ing English exponent of her work.
The core of her philosophical and religious writing - indeed the
core of all her work - is found in her notebooks. The first batch of
these which cover her life in France have been published in English
in two volumes under the title Notebooks. Her later notebooks written
in the U.S.A. and England have been published in French under the
title La Connaissance Surnaturelk (new translation in English under the
title First and Last Notebooks. As to me the greatest modern European
language is always French and she is a marvellous exponent of that
248 Thinking Their Thoughts

language, try and read some of her in French.) This I think is the
most remarkable but the most difficult of all her writings. What are all
these notebooks about, taken as a whole? They are a sustained com-
mentary on what she has been thinking, reading, and experiencing.
She continually returns to such themes as the history of philosophy,
the nature of ethics and religion, the Indian writings and Christian
scriptures, northern and ancient mythology, French literature, the
worship of the future, mathematics, physics, art, war, work, industrial-
ism, and sexuality. Perhaps if one were to single out one subject that
more than any other binds the whole together one could put it in
her own words: T am ceaselessly and increasingly torn both in my
intelligence and in the depth of my heart through my inability to con-
ceive simultaneously and in truth, the affliction of men, the perfec-
tion of God and the link between the two.' Or, in other of her words:
'As Plato said, an infinite distance separates the good from necessity
- the essential contradiction in human life is that man, with a strain-
ing after the good constituting his very being, is at the same time sub-
ject in his entire being, both in mind and in flesh, to a blind force, to
a necessity completely indifferent to the good.' This contradiction
above any other is for her the means by which the mind is led to
truth. I quote again:

There is a legitimate and an illegitimate use of contradiction. The illegiti-

mate use lies in coupling together incompatible thoughts as if they were
compatible. The legitimate use lies, first of all, when two incompatible
thoughts present themselves to the mind, in exhausting all the powers of
the intellect in an attempt to eliminate at least one of them. If this is
impossible, if both must be accepted, the contradiction must then be rec-
ognized as a fact. It must then be used as a two-limbed tool, like a pair of
pincers, so that through it direct contact may be made with the transcen-
dent sphere of truth beyond the range of the human faculties. The con-
tact is direct, though made through an intermediary, in the same way as
the sense of touch is directly affected by the uneven surface of a table
over which you pass, not your hand, but your pencil. The contact is real,
though belonging to the number of things that by nature are impossible,
for it is a case of a contact between the mind and that which is not think-
able. There is an equivalent, an image as it were, very frequent in mathe-
matics, of this legitimate use of contradiction as a means of reaching the
transcendent. It plays an essential role in Christian dogma, as one can
perceive with reference to the Trinity.
 Simone Weil 249

Her Notebooks are indeed a sustained exercise in this legitimate use of

contradiction, that is, in making as clear as can be the factual nature of
the contradiction that human existence presents, and then in using
those contradictions as pincers.
One point I must make in passing is about the word I have trans-
lated as 'affliction.' This word, which is central to her thought, is in the
French 'malheur.' There is no word in English with the complete con-
notation of that French word. I use affliction, but if anyone can think
of a better word I will be deeply grateful.
For any of you who may be interested in the history of philosophy, I
single out her continuous commentary on the dialogues of Plato,
which runs like a thread through all her notebooks. As well as her com-
ments in her notebooks there is a group of essays on the same subject
which has been published in English with the inapposite title of Intima-
tions of Christianity. In these essays about Greece she writes not only on
Plato, but on the Iliad, the Electra, the Antigone, Pythagoras, and Greek
mathematicians. As I have more right to speak about Plato than the
others, I would say that her comments on his writings go to the heart
of the matter in a way that much modern scholarship does not. Most
modern students of the philosopher start with the presupposition that
since they come later than Plato in time they must be able to judge that
thinker from a superior height. The result of such a standpoint is that
instead of seeing what Plato thought, they say that he was really saying
what he ought to have said if he were a modern intellectual. It is
because the assumptions of modernity had been smashed in Simone
Weil that her commentary on Plato is illuminating.
I must finally mention three books of hers that do not fit into my
division. The first is Sur la Science (remember her brother). The second
is Lettre a un Religieux (Letter to a Priest). This is a long letter she wrote to
an American Roman Catholic priest, putting down in detail why she
did not become a member of the Christian Church. The third volume
is a play she worked at for many years but never finished called Venise
Sauvee.
Let me now attempt to place Simone Weil within the tradition. In
doing so, however, I in no way imply that such historical placing has
anything to do with the question of whether what she says is true. I am
not an historicist, and do not think that truth of the philosophical or
religious order can be reached by historical analysis. To say that
Simone Weil belongs to the extreme wing of Greek Christianity is not
to imply that this tradition incorporates the truth more fully than
250 Thinking Their Thoughts

Western Christianity. The statement of historical fact simply leads for-

ward to the fuller and more difficult question of truth. This evening
my paper has been with a description of the life and writings of a per-
son and I intend to leave aside for this occasion the incomparably
more difficult question of the truth of what she says. The inference,
however, must be made explicit that since I spend a great part of my
life reading and thinking about this woman, it must be that I think I
am there drinking at a fountain of the divine truth.
To place Simone Weil squarely within Greek Christianity is, how-
ever, to make one fact apparent. What she says will appear extremely
alien and unlikely to Western Europeans or to North Americans
because this form of Christianity has not played a significant role in
our world for many centuries. To be a Western person is to think
within Western Christianity - Catholic or Protestant - or within one of
Christianity's secular offshoots - marxism or liberalism. Indeed, so
powerful has been the West that it is possible almost to say that to be a
man at all is to think in a Western way. But, of course, Christianity was
more than western from the beginning, and Eastern or Greek Chris-
tianity included in itself things that have been lost in the West. But in
saying that Simone Weil belongs to this Greek Christianity, I am not
saying that she was near to the institutionalized form, namely the
Greek Orthodox Church - because I am taking Greek Christianity to
be something much wider than this - I include in it much that has dis-
appeared from the world. Its last appearance in the Western world as
more than an individual phenomenon was according to her in the civ-
ilization of Languedoc and the religion of the Cathars - the civiliza-
tion which was extirpated by the Dominican order and the feudal
knights of northern France, in what is known euphemistically as the
Albigensian crusade. (History is indeed written by the victorious.)
This Greek Christianity is nearest of any of the forms of our religion
to Indian religion. While, of course, to take Hegel's dictum 'en pleine
connaissance de cause' that progress moves from East to West, North
American Christianity is farthest from them. Indeed, she saw Europe
in its Mediterranean form as a halfway house between America and
India. It is not accidental then that Simone Weil should have written
of the civilization of Languedoc as the highest that Europe has
known; nor is it accidental that she should have learned Sanskrit and

*With full knowledge.

 Simone Weil 251

considered the Bhagavadgita as a work of revelation to be accepted at

a level of authority only just lower than the Gospel according to St
John.
Indeed, to state the matter in a trite historical way, Simone Weil's
value as an object of study could be put thus: She was a person who as
much as anyone I know experienced the twentieth century - knowing
its wars and its intellectual assumptions, its hopes and its factories. In
the full sense of the word she was incarnate in the twentieth century -
that is, she knew it not only as an observer, but its afflictions became
her flesh. It was because all that the twentieth century has been was
immediately and mediately known, that she was able to transcend it
and rediscover certain treasures which our world had lost for many
centuries. Her pierced and piercing apprehension of our immediate
world enabled her to overcome that loss in ourselves, so that the
ancient religion can appear to us as more than an academic curiosity.
I end by singling out two aspects of her doctrine that clearly illus-
trate what I mean by placing her in the tradition of Greek Christianity.
In stating her doctrine, I will compare what she says with the more
usual western view on the same matter.
First, she stands unequivocally on the side of saying that the affir-
mation of the being of God is a matter of knowing and not of willing
- that is, that belief or unbelief is never a matter of choice or commit-
ment, but of intellect and attention. As the West has been without
faith, faith has often been interpreted by men of faith who wished to
get on with understanding as if it finally came down to an act of com-
mittal by the will. For instance, my experience of the clergy has often
been that when one raises difficult intellectual questions, their
answer is likely to be 'Have Faith,' and when one asks them why one
should have faith they are likely to say 'Commit yourself to it,' as if
truth were not a gift, but a free act. More and more, religion is talked
about in the West as if it were some kind of choice or opting, despite
or even against the evidence. In present-day Christianity, it is now
leading to the pitiful grabbing at existentialist philosophy as a buttress
to faith, as in Rahner and Heidegger. For existentialism is after all
the dead end of voluntarism in philosophy. Against this praise of com-
mitment, Simone Weil makes clear that belief cannot ultimately be

Karl Rahner (1904-84), German-born theologian who played a key role in the reforms
of the Second Vatican Council. His thought was deeply influenced by Martin Heideg-
ger.
252 Thinking Their Thoughts

based on choice. In her own words: 'The consent of the intellect is

never owed to anything whatsoever. For it is never in the slightest
degree a question of choice. Only attention is voluntary and thus is
the only matter of obligation. If one wishes to provoke in oneself a
voluntary consent of the intellect, what is produced is not consent to
truth but auto-suggestion. Nothing more contributes to the degrading
and enfeebling of faith and leads to the spread of unbelief than the
conception that one ought to believe in anything.' In other words,
one cannot force faith on oneself. The intellect should be entirely
free to go where the necessity of the argument leads it. This approach
to the divine is of course essentially Greek. Second and more difficult,
she rejects the language of personality and individuality as the final
truth about human beings. This language is of course basic to the
way that Western people talk of the human condition. Today in our
present world we see the consequences of such talking in the belief
that religion is in essence warmth of feeling to other people. This
worship of warmth, coated with the more comfortable parts of the
Gospel or Judaism, takes a myriad of forms in the superstructure of
talk which justifies our society, but its philosophical and religious
basis is in Western philosophy and religion, which asserts that the
individual qua individual is an ultimate irreducible in reality. So deep
does this go in our culture that thinking outside personality language
is very hard for us. Yet this is what we must do if we are to read
Simone Weil. The concrete, the personal, the particular has some
preliminary meaning in talking about human beings, but it is accord-
ing to her not ultimate. In as much as we partake in the universal we
partake in the divine. In this sense Plato is her master and she takes
him seriously in a way that nobody can who makes the language of
personality final.
Let me read you some words of hers which show clearly where the
denial of personality language leads - words which could not be writ-
ten by anyone who saw the Western tradition as sufficient.

God created; that is not to say that he produced something external to

himself, but that he withdrew, allowing a part of being to be other than
God. To this divine renunciation answers the renunciation of the cre-
ated, namely, obedience. The whole universe is nothing but a compact
mass of obedience studded with luminous points. Each of these points is
the supernatural part of the soul of a rational creature who loves God
and who consents to obey. The rest of the soul is part of the compact
 Simone Weil 253

mass. The rational creatures who do not love God are only fragments of
the compact and dense mass. They also are fully obedient, but only in
the manner of a stone which is falling. Their souls are matter, psychic
matter, subject to a mechanism as inexorable as gravity. Even their belief
in their own free will, the illusions of their pride, their defiances, their
rebellions, are, simply, phenomena as strictly determined as the refrac-
tion of light. Considered in this way, as inert matter, the worst criminals
are part of the order of the world, and for that reason, part of the beauty
of the world. Everything obeys God; everything is therefore, perfectly
beautiful.
This universal love belongs only to the contemplative faculty of the
soul. He who truly loves God leaves to each part of his soul its proper
function. Below the faculty of supernatural contemplation is found the
part of the soul that responds to obligation, and for which the opposition
of good and evil must have as much meaning as possible. Below this, is
the animal part of the soul, which must be carefully instructed by a skillful
combination of whip-lashes and lumps of sugar.

Such a statement helps us to understand why, according to her,

affliction is the lot of all human beings. It always includes in itself phys-
ical pain, but is more than this. It is the pounding in upon men that
they are really nothing, by the blind force of necessity and of social and
personal degradation. The final affliction to which all come is death.
The only difference between people is whether they consent or do not
consent to necessity. What most supports the possibility of this consent
is our attention to the beauty of the world. For that beauty is our one
image of the divine. And of its very nature it is not known as purpose-
ful, but only lovable, in the sense that a great work of art has no pur-
pose outside its own being. In her language, the beauty of the world is
caused by the divine son because it is the mediator between blind obe-
dience arid God.
In terms of this very difficult language she would see the human
condition in the following way: 'The portion of space around us, lim-
ited by the curve of the horizon, and the portion of time between birth
and death, in which we live, second after second, and which is the tis-
sue of out life, are together a fragment of that infinite distance crossed
by divine love. The being and life of each of us are a small segment of
that line whose ends are two persons but one God; and back and forth
on this line moves love who is also the same God. Each of us is but a
place through which the divine love of God for himself passes.'
254 Thinking Their Thoughts

Petrement's Simone Weil (1977)*

Among the greatest teachers of the eternal, there is a small group of

particular fascination: those who lay before us the most important
truths out of very short lives. Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four, and
yet her disparate writings are the supreme statement concerning eter-
nity made in the West in this century. The account of her life by
Simone Petrement has now been well translated into English.
The lives of great thinkers are generally not of central interest; what
is of interest is their writings. What matters to us about Kant is to
understand The Critique of Pure Reason, not how he spent his quiet life
in Konigsberg. This is, of course, finally true of Simone Weil. What
matters is to read such writings as her Notebooks, Oppression and Liberty,
or La Science et nous.
Yet there are three reasons in her case why a biography is of particu-
lar interest. The first is the fact that she was not only a thinker but a
saint, and the unity between justice and truth lies at the heart of her
teaching. She taught that desire which has not passed through the
flesh by means of appropriate action remains a sentimental phantom,
and in saying that she affirms that our apprehension of the most
important truths depends on the justice of our lives. One therefore
wants to know what kind of a life produced a teaching so terrible in its
demands.
Secondly, her writings are being attacked these days both by Freud-
ians and marxists, who are saying that the truth she states is vitiated by
her sexual or class position. The marxist attack is not surprising, when
one considers that Camus called her criticism of Marx the most persua-
sive ever written. The Freudian attacks are similar to those launched
against many women. Her writing is the product of penis envy, and this
can be seen in her relation to her brother who is a famous mathemati-
cian. The extent of these attacks makes one want to understand the
relation between her life and her writings.
Thirdly, she wrote in the midst of her intense involvement in the
class struggle and wars of Europe between 1930 and 1943. Most of her
work was not written for publication, and was published posthumously.
It is, therefore, difficult to comprehend the teachings as a whole and
to bring into unity writings which are mostly notebooks, letters, and

George Grant, review of Simone. Weil by Simone Petrement, trans. Raymond Rosenthal
(Random House 1977), Globe and Mail, 12 February 1977, 43.
 Simone Weil 255

articles. This is particularly hard for English speakers, because some of

her greatest writings have not yet been translated. For these reasons an
accurate biography is not only fascinating in its own right, but neces-
sary to the understanding of her thought.
Simone Petrement has succeeded in writing such a biography. Petre-
ment says in her introduction that she is going to put down everything
she knows, leaving it to wiser minds to judge what is essential. In the
first half of the book she brings before us the amazing family life which
combined the clarity and intensity of both the French and the secular-
ized Jewish traditions, the wonderful education received by the French
elite in 'Les Grandes Ecoles'; and then the ten years of Weil's life in
the French class struggle of the 1930s in which she made industrial
production part of her flesh. Her understanding of marxism might
well be great, for during the decade of the 1930s she lived with Marx-
ists in France, in Germany as it approached Hitlerism, and in the Span-
ish civil war. She was a friend of Trotsky. Indeed, this biography is not
only an account of a particular life but of Western Europe as a whole,
in that extraordinary decade leading up to 1939.
The second half of the book deals with more difficult events - the
possession of her life by God, and the gradual movement from that
point towards her death in 1943. It is extremely hard to write of such
events with clarity, beauty, and restraint. Petrement succeeds on all
three counts. With great precision, she unfolds the steps which led
Simone Weil to be able to receive the truths which were manifested to
her. The details of her life are combined with lucid descriptions of the
writings which poured forth in these last years. 'Poured forth' is the
right metaphor when one considers the circumstances under which
these limpid writings were composed. For example, her remarkable
work The Pythagorean Doctrine was written while she lived in a crowded
hall in North Africa with 700 refugees, while taking her father and
mother (who were Jewish) away from Hitlerism to safety. The account
that Petrement gives of how she came to participate in the eternal
never falls into the hot and romantic style sometimes used in such mat-
ters, but is always plain and clear and sane.
Petrement was a close friend of Weil. Along with Camus she was
chiefly responsible for the careful publication of Weil's work since
1945. It might be argued that a biography written from such closeness
could not be 'objective' in the strange sense of the word used by mod-
ern scholars. It is well to remember that Boswell loved Johnson, and
Boiiaventure loved Francis, and these are two of the greatest lives in
256 Thinking Their Thoughts

the Western tradition. Petrement is not only writing as a friend but

also as a leading French scholar and thinker. Her books about gnosti-
cism stand in their own right. She brings to this biography not only
friendship but high philosophic training, and that clarity of style which
makes French such an instrument of the truth. In this sense the biogra-
phy will continue to be central to any understanding of Simone Weil.
It will replace other accounts which presented her life and thought in
a more sensational and one-sided way. Raymond Rosenthal has done
wisely in following the French literally and carefully in his translation.
Something must be lost in English, particularly in the quotations from
Weil herself. French was the instrument of her teaching and the writ-
ing is of that rare kind in which the words are transparent to the
thought. The English translation has cut some of the philosophic pas-
sages from the original French edition. This is perhaps appropriate to
its audience, but insulting.
In an age when oblivion of eternity has become the fate of Western-
ers (not least among its theologians and philosophers), it is difficult to
read Simone Weil despite the clarity of her writing. Nevertheless, just
because Western Christianity has realized its destiny of becoming secu-
larized, it is essential to tear oneself free of the causes of that destiny,
without removing oneself from the necessities of our present or from
the reality of Christ. At the beginning of this biography, Petrement
puts down the saying of Christ: 'Happy are those who hunger and
thirst for justice.' Such a statement must be incomprehensible and/or
terrifying when we moderns try to think of it as true. Where does it
lead one? Simone Weil's thought is a rigorous exposition of what is
implied in the terms of that statement.

In Defence of Simone Weil (1988)

The Republic is, at the least, a drama about how Socrates cures Plato's
brother of righteous anger. I need to remember the benefits of that
cure in reviewing this book. Dr Coles has written a book about Simone
Weil in the Radcliffe Biography series. He is a professor of psychiatry at
the Harvard Medical School. His book is in a biography series but is in

* George Grant, 'In Defence of Simone Weil,' The. Idler, no. 15 (January - February 1988),
36—40, in response to Robert Coles, Simone. Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley 1987).
 Simone Weil 257

fact a commentary on her personality and life, accompanied through-

out by an obbligato of quotations from his conversations about her with
Dr Anna Freud, the daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis. I have
the temptation to anger because the two writers patronize a great saint
and thinker. By 'saint,' I mean those rare people who give themselves
away. By 'great thinker,' I mean somebody who is remarkably open to
the whole. Simone Weil wrote with genius about the two most impor-
tant Western matters, Christ and Plato. It is hard to avoid anger when
one's chief modern teacher is patronized in the sweetie-pie accents of
Cambridge, Mass., and Hampstead, U.K.
Coles's and Freud's commentary reminds me of the following:
'Shakespeare was really quite a good poet. Some of his verses are to be
commended. He obviously did not have our advantages, but he wrote
pretty well. His writing shows how neurotic he was, but he can't be
blamed for that. He did not do too badly, considering that he did not
have the benefit of our help.'
To take two examples where Coles's words lead away from what
Simone Weil was:
1. Coles writes: 'She had no sexual life.' Simone Weil's closest friend
told me in the Gare du Nord in Paris: 'I can tell you that Simone Weil
knew human love in its most complete form.' Clearly the friend
thought I was some kind of American and would therefore judge sex-
ual life as the decisive matter in the discussion of another human
being. She cared that I write properly of Simone Weil, and knew that
as a North American intellectual I was unlikely to understand the Med-
iterranean tradition of chastity. But she certainly would not have told
me this if it were not the case. Simone Weil wrote: 'The desire to love
another human being as the expression of the beauty of the world is
the desire for the Incarnation.' Does that sentence suggest that 'she
had no sexual life'?
As Coles and Freud are doing the psychoanalytical bit on Weil, it is
well to mention the account written for herself1 just as she is preparing
to go to work in the Renault factory, at the age of twenty-five. In this
account she writes of what she must overcome in herself if she is to be
what she wants to be. It is extremely detailed about the particularities
of her body and soul. Because it is written for herself it is very intimate,
and therefore I have some hesitation in writing of it. But Mile Petre-
ment is certainly a wiser human being than I am, and has published it.
It is probably true that concerning the saints all evidence must be
made public. It is not written in terms of the 'id' psychology that Freud
258 Thinking Their Thoughts

got from Nietzsche. It is, rather, a fine example of Socrates's 'Know

thyself.'
2. It is now necessary to discuss the much more serious question of
Coles's account of Simone Weil's relation to the Judaism of her ances-
tors. Obviously this must be written about with the greatest care
because of the terrible events in Europe and the Middle East in this
century. I think Coles does badly here for a reason of decency. He
wants to open her thought to the students at Harvard, and knows that
he must explain her refusal of Judaism if he is to succeed. But in this
process he makes bad errors about her and her family, and about what
can best be called the history of religions. It is therefore necessary to
pursue this second subject in some detail.
Coles rightly calls Weil a Christian, but then makes the error of iden-
tifying that Christianity with modern Western Christianity. To put it
religiously, one might say that Christianity on one side has turned
towards Judaism and on the other towards the Vedanta. To put it
philosophically, one might say that Christianity in its meeting with phi-
losophy for the purposes of self-understanding has had Aristotelian
and Platonic wings. Weil is clearly with the Platonists. Weil's writings
therefore contain a clear and sustained rejection of Roman Catholi-
cism - that is, a refusal of the most important tradition of the West.
She criticized it more often than Judaism, though often on the same
grounds.
The impression that Coles has gathered of Weil's flirting with
Catholicism has some justification, but in essence misses the point.
Weil did clearly long to take part in the sacrament of the Eucharist,
because that sacrament concerns the suffering of God. She was a Chris-
tian in that she accepted the suffering of God. We should remember
that some of the classical philosophers, such as Proclus, rejected Chris-
tianity because they did not believe that God could suffer. Although
Weil accepted the suffering of God, nevertheless she could not fulfil
her hunger for the bread of eternal life because she could not accept
Roman Catholicism on other grounds.
Categorizing great thinkers is always a dangerous task. It may, how-
ever, be possible to cautiously call Weil a gnostic. Yet there must be
immediate qualifications. As a follower of Plato, Weil holds within her
thought that measured blending of 'gnosticism' and 'agnosticism' that
characterizes her intellectual master. Moreover, 'gnosticism,' as a
recurring historical fact, has had within it excesses and follies, as have
all forms of Christianity. (It would be impertinent to speak of other
 Simone Weil 259

great religions.) In our time, as good a thinker about politics as Voege-

lin has wrongly used 'gnosticism' as a term of abuse in his fine book,
The New Science of Politics. Therefore, it is with hesitation that I catego-
rize Weil as a 'gnostic,' in order to make clear that it was more than
accident that held her from becoming a Catholic.
Nevertheless, it is not without significance that Simone Petrement,
who has written the definitive biography of Simone Weil, is also a lead-
ing scholar of gnosticism. (Her biography is so clear and so complete
that it must be ranked among the great biographies.) Coles recognizes
in a short paragraph Weil's closeness to Marcion. What he does not
seem to recognize is that gnosticism has returned again and again
within Christianity, and Weil's writings are filled with references to
these recurrences. To take one example: she wrote frequently of the
gnosticism of medieval France, which produced the civilization of
Languedoc. The sympathetic have described this movement as the reli-
gion of the Cathars (from the Greek word for 'pure'); its members are
also known by the geographic name of Albigeois. Their civilization was
extirpated by northern knights under Simon de Montfort, encouraged
by the papacy. This extirpation goes by the title of the 'Albigensian
crusade.' The Inquisition was first founded for the purposes of that
crusade, and its ecclesiastical leadership was in the hands of the
Dominican order. As Stalin said, history is written by the winners, and
therefore we have few authentic records of this movement. Most of
what we have is the testimony of its adherents under torture. In this
century in France there has been a partially successful effort to find
out what Catharism was. Two of Weil's noblest writings are about the
Cathars.
The reason it is important to mention these historical matters in the
present connection is that Coles's lack of interest or knowledge of
them is, I think, determinative of the worst chapter of his book, 'Her
Jewishness.' Weil was essentially a gnostic saint, and her criticisms of
Judaism are similar to those which have appeared through the centu-
ries in gnostic writings: namely, her rejection of the Hebrew Bible and
its account of God. Catholics quickly recognized this after her death.
Cardinal Danielou edited a book of essays in which she is indicted for
her rejection of the Old Testament. Indeed, this book goes much far-
ther than Coles's and Freud's patronizing psychoanalysis. It directly
accuses her of 'penis envy,' and her 'misinterpretation' of the Hebrew
Bible is laid at that door. Unlike Coles, the Catholics have had no
doubt that her Christianity was not at one with Western Christianity,
260 Thinking Their Thoughts

but rather with what had been continually rejected by official Western
Christianity.
Apart from these comments about the history of religions, it is
necessary to touch upon the particular details of 'her Jewishness.' I am
hesitant to do so, because the details of the lives of thinkers are unim-
portant compared to the universal truths in which they participate. But
sanctity is not the same thing as philosophy, and in describing sanctity,
details matter. Coles writes of these details in such a way as to impugn
that sanctity. Also, the relation between Weil and her parents is one of
the tender parts of her greatness, and it is discussed by Coles with a sin-
gular lack of feeling. He writes of the hurt to her family when she left
Judaism. I talked to Mme Weil at length about this matter. I cannot
speak about Dr Weil because I did not meet him, but Mme Weil had
obviously been very attached to her husband, and therefore had some
right to speak of his opinions. Mme Weil came from a family which had
moved west from Russia under the influence of the Enlightenment.
Paris was after all the centre of that movement, and of the revolution
that had attempted to realize its ends politically. She belonged to the
France that believed that human freedom required putting away the
superstitions of religion, whether those of Christianity or of Judaism.
She early recognized that she had produced two remarkable children.
(Her son, Andre Weil, is considered in many quarters to be the greatest
mathematician of this century.) She loved the greatness in her daugh-
ter, and devoted herself to protecting Simone from its consequences. It
was not always easy. When Simone Weil had Trotsky to stay with her
family, her mother accepted this because her daughter's 'left-wing'
opinions seemed only an extension of her particular brand of modern
French nationalism. Like many of her generation, Mme Weil had
learned to loathe war between 1914 and 1918, particularly from her
connection with the wounded patients of her husband, who served the
French army as a doctor during the first great massacre. Being a decent
rationalist, she had thought of herself as French without any religion.
It was almost inconceivable to her to find suddenly that the racism of
the gutter had come to power in Germany in 1933. This was a common
experience of many progressive Western Europeans. Gershom Scho-
lem has described it well in his autobiography. Something had come
to be in their midst, which they did not identify with a Western country

Gershom Scholem, From Berlin toJerusalem, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Scholem Books
1980).
 Simone Weil 261

such as Germany, but with the superstitions of a pre-progressive age.

Never having thought herself as in essence Jewish, she now had to real-
ize that she was being forced to consider herself a Jew, because of this
modern craziness.
At the end of Simone Weil's life, she indeed used a greeting from
Krishna in her letters to her parents. Her parents knew little of her
movement to Christianity, and at this difficult time of her dying far
away from them, she knew that they might be disturbed or surprised by
what had happened to her. But after all, the Bhagavadgita is an
inspired text, and for Simone Weil Krishna and Christ were perhaps
the same being.
After her daughter's death, Mme Weil spent her life holding
together Simone's manuscripts, before Camus and Petrernent saw that
they were placed in the Bibliotheque Nationale. When I talked to her,
she had pondered every line of these manuscripts and thought they
were of high truth. Once when I was leaving her flat, she stopped me
and repeated Herbert's* great poem 'Love,' which had been central in
her daughter's life:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd any thing.
A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

* George Herbert (1593-1633), British metaphysical poet.

262 Thinking Their Thoughts

That was not the act of somebody who had been wounded by her
daughter's acceptance of Christ. I have before me Mme Weil's
account, in her own handwriting, of when and where her daughter
wrote the 'Prologue,' in which she describes how Christ came to her.
Mme Weil wrote it out for me, because there had been some historical
confusion as to when the event had occurred. It cuts across what Coles
has written about Simone Weil having wounded her parents. It is a
document of lucidity and joy. Any confusion she may have experi-
enced by having brought into the world this eagle was utterly subordi-
nated to her acceptance that her daughter had been visited in the
flesh directly by Christ.
The silliest thing in Coles's book is what he writes about her letter to
Xavier Vallat, who had the appalling title of Commissioner of Jewish
Affairs in the Vichy government. Weil wrote that she could not get a
teaching job in Vichy because she was considered Jewish. She says that
it is irrational to consider her as Jewish because her intellectual tradi-
tions are entirely classical and French. Coles maintains that this was a
weaseling letter of a coward denying her Judaism at a time when Jews
were being persecuted. It is a long letter of ironic contempt from a
well-known Frenchwoman to a powerful man in a position that Weil
knew should not exist in any constitutional government. Of course,
such an extreme difference of interpretation could only be decided by
a long 'explication du texte,' which is not possible in a short review. Two
things can be said. 1. Could Weil possibly have expected to get a job
after writing such a letter? 2. Does Coles imply that Judaism is a given
that one cannot leave?
Petrement describes accurately the content of this letter: 'If in this
letter Simone boldly affirms that she doesn't consider herself a Jew, it
is not in order to disassociate herself in practice from the Jews - she
would not disassociate herself from anyone, above all not from people
being persecuted, and in Marseilles she did much to help Jews - nor in
any way to deny her origins; nor is it to affirm a religious conviction
that would have no interest for the Commissioner of Jewish Affairs.
Instead, she did this in order to emphasize again the difficulty of defin-
ing the word Jew,' and to show quite clearly that she does not under-
stand its significance and considers the statute concerning the Jews
absurd and incomprehensible.'
Of course, the high style of irony is hardly the forte of Americans.
The public spirits of the United States are capitalism, imperialism,
and a certain form of democracy. Irony is too high a style to be conso-
 Simone Weil 263

nant with any of these spirits. The mordant wit that suggests contra-
diction requires too great an attention for that swift-moving society.
American-popularized Freudianism has not added to the capacity for
irony. This book is indeed a warning to those who write about any
'kalos kagathos from the position of superiority. One is apt to expose
oneself.
Of course, Coles has the right and perhaps the duty to defend Juda-
ism. (I use 'perhaps' because I do not know whether he is a Jew. If he
is, he obviously has the duty to defend Judaism.) Catholics have the
right and the duty to defend Western Christianity against Weil's criti-
cism of it. But the combination of the defence of Judaism with the
patronizing tones of the Harvard Medical School is repellent. I am
sure that the theologians of Judaism (for example, the Roth brothers
in England) have a lot to say about where Judaism is correct and
Simone Weil is wrong. Theological debate does not sit well with psychi-
atric imputation as to motive. Beyond matters of debate, it is absurd to
impugn the courage of this undaunted woman.
Enough about this book. As Simone Weil's writings are largely in the
form of notebooks and essays, it is hard to find one's way into them.
Therefore I hope it will not seem impertinent to mention means of
doing so. Simone Petrement's biography is much the best. Before
sanctity one can either be silent or matter-of-fact. Petrement's life is
astringent French scholarship at its best. Theoretical comprehension is
of course easier than writing about sanctity. For such comprehension,
M. Veto's La Metaphysique Religieuse de Simone Weil is the most careful
among many good books. As Professor Veto is now at Yale, it is to be
hoped that his book will be translated into English.^
The centre of what Simone Weil writes is something that human
beings must learn for themselves in the terror of thought and prayer.
To read her sentence 'matter is our infallible judge' is to understand
what Christ meant when he said, T come not with peace but with a
sword.' At a more theoretical and exoteric level, at a less immediate
and therefore more palatable level, she is saying something about what
is happening in the Western world. She returns continually to Plato's
statement: 'How great is the real difference between necessity and the
good' (Republic, 493c).
Noble and good (Greek).
M Veto. La Metaphysique religieuse de Simone. We.il (Paris: J. Urin 1971). As Grant hoped,
the book was published in English: The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil (Albany, N.Y.:
State University of New York Press 1994).
264 Thinking Their Thoughts

What is given in that sentence cannot but touch what is given in

Christian teaching. Weil wrote that she was ceaselessly torn by the con-
tradiction between the perfection of God and the affliction of human
beings. How is it possible that human beings are given over to the
afflictions of necessity? What is it to contemplate Goodness itself in the
light of the afflictions of necessity? She waited upon that contradiction
with ceaseless attention. In that waiting she restated the idea of cre-
ation, not in a new way in terms of what is given in the Gospels, but in
a new way in the sense that her idea has not been primary in modern
Western Christianity. The idea of creation is obviously an abyss in
which our minds are swallowed up. Despite the absurd contemporary
use of the word 'creativity,' we cannot think of something coming to
be out of nothing. Nevertheless, quite rightly, people have tried to find
analogies which can lead us to see as in a glass darkly.
For Western Christians - let us say, loosely, since Hildebrand - cre-
ation came to be thought of as an act of self-expansion. For Weil, cre-
ation is a withdrawal, an act of love, involved with all the suffering,
renunciation, and willingness to let the other be, that are given in the
idea of love. For her the passion of God is at one with the creation. In
this sense it is one with the teaching about the Trinity.
It is not possible here to work out how this is so consummately devel-
oped in her writings. (To repeat, outside her own writings this has best
been done by Veto.) Nor is it possible to discuss what is thought in the
idea of God as love in relation to what is thought in the idea of God as
power. It can be said, however, that the two leading forms of Western
Christianity are in intellectual chaos. Can one imagine that large ele-
ments of Roman Catholicism took and .take Teilhard de Chardin seri-
ously as a Christian theologian? It is clear that civilizational identity
depends on primal religious affirmations, in this case the post-Augus-
tinian self-understanding of Christianity. It is clear that the descent of
Western civilizational identity into wild technological scrambling goes
with the self-confusions of organized Western Christianity. Moreover,
Nietzsche's formulation that Christianity produced its own gravedig-
gers in the modern technological rationalists has some historical sense
to it, but perhaps in a different way than Nietzsche's positive affirma-

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), French religious philosopher and paleontolo-

gist.
 Simone Weil 265

tions would suggest. One must remember that modern technological

rationalism was itself more penetrated by Western Christianity than
Nietzsche would allow. The self-expansion of the modern technolo-
gists attacked certain aspects of Christianity, but took from that which
it was attacking the self-expanding power that came forth from the 'Rex
tremendae majestatis,'* in which creation is utterly defined as power. At a
time such as this when on the one hand the Gospels stand in their
indubitable perfection, while on the other hand the civilization of the
West has become mainly technology, it is well to read carefully a
thinker of consummate intelligence and love who understood that
Christianity becomes meaningless if the creating of God is detached
from the passion of God. Simone Weil often speaks of 'the lamb that
was slain from the beginning of the world.'
When in admiration and love I look for a description of Simone
Weil, some lines from Crashaw's invocation to Saint Theresa of Avila
come to mind:

O thou undaunted daughter of desires!

By all thy dow'r of Lights and Fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they-

NOTES

1 'The account written for herself. '-This is published in Simone Petrement's La Vie
de Simone Weil (Simone Weil: A Life); in the French, vol. 2: 11-14; in the Ameri-
can translation, 219-22. It must be said that the American translation is often
poor. In this passage,''jouissance is translated as 'pleasure.' If possible, it is well
to read it in French, especially when it comes to Weil's own words. She wrote
the most luminous of Western languages with a clarity that is breathtaking.
Nothing seems to stand between the words and what they are about.
2 'Her letter to Xavier Vallat.' - For the letter in full, see Petrement's Life; in
the French, vol. 2: 377-9; in the English translation, 443-4.

King of fearful majesty (Latin), from the 'Dies Irae,' a thirteenth-century hymn used in
masses for the dead.
266 Thinking Their Thoughts

LEO STRAUSS (1899-1973) AND

ALEXANDRE KOJEVE (1902-68)

Grant was deeply influenced by a debate between the German-American political

philosopher Leo Strauss and the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve on
the question of whether ancient or modern political science could best explain the
phenomenon of tyranny. Both writers had an impact on his thought. From
Kojeve he learned that the modern world was moving, inevitably, as Kojeve had
argued in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, towards a universal
and homogeneous state, in which there would be no war and no class struggle.
Strauss's reply persuaded him that such an outcome would represent the worst,
not the best, condition for human beings. Grant later read many of Strauss's
books and returned to his writings for pleasure even in the 1980s after he had
rejected many of Strauss's main conclusions.

I have read and re-read The City and Man. I wonder if sometime you were free I
could come to Chicago and take a very short bit of your time to ask you two
questions. It would not be in the immediate future, as the questions about
Socrates and the Christian tradition I have not yet properly formulated. The
other question is concerning Aristotle and Plato's dialogues. I must express to
you again my enormous sense of gratitude for every word you have written.
- George Grant to Leo Strauss, 21 January 1965

In reissuing an old book of mine I tried to pay you a compliment in a new intro-
duction. I am enclosing my words on another page because my sense of debt is
so great.
- George Grant to Leo Strauss, 25 April 1966

It was through Straus that I came upon Kojeve. Let me say that I think Doull
knows more about Strauss than Kojeve (not having written much, Doull is only
known to his friends.) It was to escape Hegel I found Strauss & through Strauss
I found Kojeve.
Let me say also that although my debt to Strauss is great as a teacher of what
makes up modernity; Simone Weil is the being whose thought is to me the
enrapturing ... I can imagine being capable of writing something as perceptive
& lucid as Strauss, but I cannot imagine loving God & being possessed by Christ
as S.W. was.
- George Grant to Joan O'Donovan, 25 January 1981
 Leo Strauss and Alexandra Kojeve 267

I have for quite awhile believed that one of the deepest strands in Strauss's writ-
ing about Plato has been to criticize the long hold of Xian Platonism in the
western and eastern interpretation of Plato. He has done this wisely & with no
foolishly polemical spirit. I have wanted to write about this, but have been held
back because I see no good purpose served (as he did not) in emphasizing
these days the difference between Jews & Xians. As he saw clearly it stems from
the deep difference concerning the nature (I mean more than the content) of
divine revelation. He was deeper & wiser about this than some of his epigones.
I may write about this someday, but fairly indirectly.
- George Grant to Ed Andrew, 27 December 1983

Tyranny and Wisdom (1964)

Professor Leo Strauss's book On Tyranny was published in 1948. In

1954 a French translation was published with an accompanying essay
by Monsieur Alexandre Kojeve, entitled Tyrannic et Sagesse, and a reply
to Kojeve by Strauss. In 1959 Strauss included his reply to Kojeve in
English in What Is Political Philosophy^
My purpose in writing is not to give a summary of the controversy
between Strauss and Kojeve. Both men know better than I do what
words are necessary to make clear what they mean. Modern academic
writing is strewn with impertinent precis written by those who think
they can say in fewer words what wiser men than they have said in
more. In this paper many of Strauss's and Kojeve's arguments will not
be mentioned. Rather, I intend to comment on certain propositions
and arguments in that controversy which interest me because they
appear to be fundamental to political theory. Nevertheless, it is inevita-
ble that I start by stating what the controversy in its most general form
would seem to be about.2
Strauss affirms that 'tyranny is a danger coeval with political life.'3
He maintains that modern social science has not been able to compre-
hend modern tyranny. He recognizes that there are differences
between antique and modern tyranny. 'Present day tyranny, in contra-
distinction to classical tyranny, is based on the unlimited progress in
the "conquest of nature" which is made possible by modern science, as
well as on the popularization or diffusion of philosophic or scientific

'Tyranny and Wisdom,' in Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi 1964), 82-
96. Used with permission.
268 Thinking Their Thoughts

knowledge. Nevertheless, to understand modern tyranny it is first

necessary to understand 'the elementary and in a sense natural form of
tyranny which is pre-modern tyranny.'' Hiero is 'the only writing of the
classical period which is explicitly devoted to the discussion of tyranny
and its implications, and to nothing else. Strauss's primary purpose is
therefore to write a proper commentary on that work. By proper I
mean that he is concerned with explicating what Xenophon wrote, not
with his own thoughts about it. But it is clear that in doing this he
affirms by implication that classical social science can understand tyr-
anny in a way that modern social science cannot. It is this assumption
in Strauss's commentary which Kojeve makes explicit in his essay.
Strauss in his reply to Kojeve confirms that this is his contention.
Kojeve never argues with Strauss about his interpretation of Xeno-
phon. He continually uses the term Xenophon-Strauss in a way which
makes clear that Strauss has correctly interpreted Xenophon's doc-
trine. He also agrees with Strauss that contemporary social science
does not understand tyranny and in particular the relation between
tyranny and philosophy. Kojeve nevertheless rejects the classical solu-
tion to the definition of tyranny; indeed, he rejects classical political
science in general. In its place he affirms the truth of Hegel's political
theory as being able to describe tyranny correctly and indeed all the
major questions of political theory. Strauss does not question that
Kojeve has interpreted Hegel correctly. I will therefore use the phrase
Hegel-Kojeve in this essay. The centre of the controversy is, then,
whether classical political science or modern political science (as per-
fected in Hegel) can the better understand the relation between the
tyrant and the wise man or indeed any of the basic political questions.
In stating that the issue of the controversy is between classical and
Hegelian political science, one must avoid a possible misunderstand-
ing which if entertained would prevent one from taking Strauss seri-
ously. Strauss affirms both that present-day tyranny is different from
ancient tyranny and that classical social science understood tyranny in
a way that no modern social science can. From such statements the
obvious question arises: how could the ancients understand something
which did not exist in their day? (Such a question will be particularly
pressing for those social scientists whose intellectual outlook may be
briefly described as 'historicism.' Indeed, historicism may prevent such
scholars from even reading Strauss's arguments.) The apparent incon-
sistency is resolved in this way: Strauss says that what distinguishes mod-
ern tyranny from ancient tyranny is the presence in the modern world
 Leo Strauss and Alexandra Kojeve 269

of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the belief in the
possibility of the popularization of philosophy and science. Both these
possibilities were known to the ancient philosophers. 'But the classics
rejected them as "unnatural." i.e., as destructive of humanity. They did
not dream of present day tyranny because they regarded its basic pre-
suppositions as so preposterous that they turned their imaginations in
entirely different directions.' In terms of this historical assertion, both
Strauss's affirmations can be made. Classical political science was not
familiar with modern tyranny, but it was familiar with the assumptions
which distinguish it from antique tyranny. Strauss is obviously asserting
the classical view that tyranny is a form of government common to all
ages and that the political philosopher can have knowledge of what is
common to these governments of disparate ages so that he can cor-
rectly call each of them tyrannies. The contemporary social scientist
may criticize such a position, but his disagreement is a philosophical
one. It does not arise from an obvious mistake about the facts on
Strauss's part.
It is difficult to know where to plunge into the controversy. Such
uncertainty is inevitable once the incipient political philosopher has
recognized that his study cannot avoid being metaphysical and that
therefore he must try to learn from those who can think more widely
and consistently than himself. For whatever else may be said about the
philosophers who related their doctrine on political matters to their
desire to have knowledge of the whole, among the best of them there
has been a monumental consistency which related their doctrine on
one issue to what they taught on all others. Both Strauss and Kojeve
have studied the masters with great care and therefore know in detail
the political teachings of the metaphysicians. They are both aware of
the wide extent to which the difference between classical and Hegelian
political teaching involves a difference of doctrine on nearly every
major issue of political theory. Indeed to state the obvious, the contro-
versy implies throughout a difference of opinion about the object and
method of philosophy, in the more than political sense of that word. I
do not want simply to check off these differences in detail, yet on the
other hand I do not feel competent to define the central principles
which divide classical from Hegelian metaphysics. For these reasons I
take the plunge into the controversy at the point of a concrete political
teaching.
Kojeve affirms that the universal and homogeneous state is the best
social order and that mankind advances to the establishment of such
270 Thinking Their Thoughts

an order. The proof of this is, according to Kojeve, found in Hegel's

Phenomenology of Spirit, and Kojeve sketches the argument of that book
in a few pages of his essay. From that sketch his account of the proper
relation between tyranny and wisdom emerges. Alexander, pupil of a
philosopher, was the first ruler who met with success in realizing a uni-
versal state, that is, an empire of which men could become citizens not
simply because of their common ethnic or geographic background,
but because they shared a common 'essence.' And that essence was, in
the last analysis, their sharing of what modern men call 'civilization' -
the culture of the Greeks which was for Alexander the culture of rea-
son itself. But according to Hegel-Kojeve, Alexander, as a Greek phi-
losopher, could not overcome the distinction between masters and
slaves. Thus, his universal state could not be homogeneous - a society
without classes. The distinction between master and slave was only
overcome as a consequence of the Semitic religions (Judaism, Chris-
tianity, and Islam.) For the West this culminated in Saint Paul. To
quote:

It is the idea of the fundamental equality of all those who believe in a single
God. This transcendental conception of social equality differs radically
from the Socratic-Platonic conception of the identity of beings having the
same immanent 'essence.' For Alexander, a disciple of the Greek philoso-
phers, the Hellene and the Barbarian have the same title to political citi-
zenship in the Empire, to the extent that they have the same human
(moreover, rational, logical, discursive) 'nature' (=essence, idea, form
etc.) or are 'essentially' identified with each other as the result of a direct
(='immediate') 'mixture' of their innate qualities (realized by mean of
biological union.) For St Paul there is no 'essential' (irreducible) differ-
ence between the Greek and the Jew because they both can become
Christians, and this is not by 'mixing' their Greek and Jewish 'qualities,'
but by negating them both and 'synthesizing' them in and by this very
negation into a homogeneous unity not innate or given, but (freely) cre-
ated by 'conversion.' Because of the negating character of the Christian
'synthesis,' there are no longer any incompatible 'qualities,' or 'contra-
dictory' (=mutually exclusive) 'qualities.' For Alexander, a Greek philoso-
pher, there was no possible mixture of Masters and Slaves, for they were
'opposites.' Thus his universal State, which did away with race, could not
be homogeneous in the sense that it would equally do away with 'class.' For
St Paul on the contrary, the negation (active to the extent that 'faith' is an
act, being 'dead' without 'acts') of the opposition between the pagan Mas-
 Leo Strauss and Alexandra Kojeve 271

tery and Servitude could engender an 'essentially' new Christian unity

(which is, moreover, active or acting, or 'emotional,' and not purely ratio-
nal or discursive, that is, 'logical') which could serve as the basis not only
for political universality, but also for the social homogeneity of the State.8

The union of the political ideas of universality and homogeneity

could not, however, result in the universal and homogeneous state
becoming a realizable political end when it came into the West as part
of Christian theism. That religion did not suppose such a state to be
fully realizable in the world, but only in the beyond, in the kingdom of
heaven. Homogeneity based on faith in a transcendent God could only
lead to the conception of the universal and homogeneous church, not
to a universal and homogeneous state. For the universal and homoge-
neous state to be a realizable political end, Christian theism had first to
be negated. This negation was the accomplishment of modern philos-
ophy - an accomplishment of such men as Hobbes and Spinoza which
was completed by Hegel. Modern philosophy was able to secularize
(that is, to rationalize or transform into coherent discourse) the reli-
gious idea of the equality of all men. Thus, the idea of the classless
society is a derivative of the Christian religion because modern philos-
ophy in negating the Christian religion was aware of the truth present
in that which it negated. The universal and homogeneous state
became a realizable political order (because of modern philosophy)
and has been, is, and will be made actual by rulers.
Whatever else should be said of Kojeve's sketch of Western political
history, it is surely accurate to affirm that the universal and homoge-
neous state has been the dominant ideal in recent modern political
thought, not only among those who have recognized their debt to
Hegel but among many who would scorn Hegel's philosophy. Indeed,
the drive to the universal and homogeneous state remains the domi-
nant ethical 'ideal' to which our contemporary society appeals for
meaning in its activity. In its terms our society legitimizes itself to itself.
Therefore, any contemporary man must try to think the truth of this
core of political liberalism, if he is to know what it is to live in this
world. The need to think the truth of this ideal remains even as its
content empties into little more than the pursuit of technical expan-
sion. It is Kojeve's contention that Hegel's comprehension of the
implications of asserting that the universal and homogeneous state is
the best political ideal was complete in a way not present in any other
political philosopher.
272 Thinking Their Thoughts

This sketch indicates the proper relation between politicians and

philosophers, according to Hegel-Kojeve. Only by discursive, philo-
sophic reflection can a person become completely aware of the given
historical situation at any moment. But the philosopher who is com-
pletely aware of the given historical situation must distinguish between
that situation and the ideal. This distinction between the actual and
the ideal leads to the negation of the given historical situation by strug-
gle and work. Such practical negating has always been accomplished
by political tyrants. There would thus be no historical progress if phi-
losophers did not instruct politicians in the meaning of actual histori-
cal situations.
Equally there would be no philosophical progress if practising politi-
cians did not realize the teaching of the philosophers in the world
through work and struggle. This doctrine is, of course, of central sig-
nificance in approaching the Hegelian dialectic. Philosophy is always
the account of actuality as it has become in any particular epoch,
including the contradictions of that epoch. Therefore, philosophy can-
not hope to reach any conclusions which transcend the social situation
of its age. Progress in philosophy, then, depends on the contradictions
of a particular epoch being overcome by struggle and work, and this is
always centred in the work of particular tyrants. Any other view of phi-
losophy pre-supposes that philosophy is concerned with timeless con-
cepts or, in other words, with an ahistorical eternal order. The belief
that philosophy is concerned with the eternal order is based on the
fundamental error of classical logic that being is eternally identical
with itself. Kojeve's motto could be the famous tag of Hegel's: 'Was die
Zeit betrifft, so ist sie der daseiende Begriff selbst.' The fundamental
assumption of Hegelian logic (that being creates itself throughout the
course of history and that eternity is the totality of all historical
epochs) is only taken seriously at the level of politics in the recognition
of the dependence of philosophers on the activity of tyrants. Kojeve
returns again and again in his writings to the point that Hegel alone
has recognized fully the relation between the modern negation of the-
ism and man's freedom to make the world (history). Only in the radi-
cal negation of theism is it possible to assert that there is progress -
that is, that there is any sense or over-all direction to history. This pro-
gressive and atheist interpretation of Hegel illustrates and in turn is

What concerns time is the concept of the presence of Being itself.

 Leo Strauss and Alexandra Kojeve 273

illustrated by the doctrine that progress in philosophy and the success-

ful practice of wise tyrants depend upon each other.
One related facet of this interdependence between wisdom and tyr-
anny is Kojeve's assertion that the realization of the universal and
homogeneous state will involve the end of philosophy. The love of wis-
dom will disappear because human beings will be able to achieve wis-
dom. For Kojeve, this realization of wisdom has been first achieved in
the writings of Hegel. But this appearance of the Sage had to be pre-
ceded by the action of that tyrant (Napoleon) who established the
basis of the universal and homogeneous state. According to Kojeve,
Hegel has produced the book (Bible) of wisdom which has definitely
replaced the one with that title which we have had for two thousand
years. This implies that for Kojeve the events of 1830-1945 and after
have been simply the completion in the world of that universal and
homogeneous state which was initiated in one geographic area by
Napoleon and which was completely understood by Hegel. Such an
interpretation of Kojeve would explain why he has used his philo-
sophic talents simply to expound Hegel and why he has devoted most
of his energies to the practical world.
Strauss's most general criticism of this account of Western history is
that it is based on the assumption that the universal and homogeneous
state is the best social order. That is, according to Strauss, the Hegelian
philosophy of history is essentially an attempt to interpret Western his-
tory so that the two propositions 'the universal and homogeneous state
is the best social order' and 'this social order will be built by man' will
be shown to be true. Before proceeding to describe his arguments fur-
ther, I must comment on what this general criticism by Strauss shows
about the form of his argument as a whole. It is clear that in saying that
Hegel's philosophy of history depends upon a universal proposition
about all social orders, Strauss is speaking within the assumptions of
classical philosophy; namely, that political philosophy stands or falls by
its ability to transcend history, i.e., by its ability to make statements
about the best social order the truth of which is independent of chang-
ing historical epochs and which therefore cannot be deduced from
any philosophy of history which makes positive statements about the
historical process. But this assumption about political philosophy is in
turn dependent on the assumption that the Socratic account of philos-
ophy as a whole is true. Strauss also knows that for Hegel-Kojeve the
truth about the best social order is not prior to an interpretation of his-
tory and could not be known except at a certain epoch. This truth is
274 Thinking Their Thoughts

reached by an argument which appeals to an interpretation of the sum

of historical epochs which in totality, for the Hegelian, constitutes eter-
nity. For the Hegelian, political philosophy does not stand or fall by its
ability to transcend history, but rather by its ability to comprehend all
history. Strauss knows that the difference between Hegel and the clas-
sics about the place of 'history' in the whole depends upon and illus-
trates a profound difference between them about the object, method,
and standpoint of the study of philosophy in a more than political
sense.
The question may then be asked: Why does Strauss criticize Kojeve
from within an account of philosophy which Kojeve does not accept?
Why does he not argue about the fundamental difference as to the
nature of philosophy rather than the implications which follow from
this difference concerning the proper relation between tyranny and
wisdom? The answer to this clarifies the limits of Strauss's intentions.
His first concern is not to refute Hegelianism but to show that the clas-
sical account of the relation between tyranny and wisdom is required
by the classical account of philosophy; that is, that there is consistency
between what the classics say about the whole and about politics, and
that therefore classical political philosophy is not to be judged as a first
phase of the subject, which has been left behind as mankind has pro-
gressed. Should this seem a limited task, it is perhaps worth pointing
out that it is a necessary preliminary to the more difficult matter of
being able to say that the political teaching of the classics is true in a
way that modern political teaching is not. Also, the need of this prelim-
inary is particularly pressing for anyone who wishes to encourage the
serious study of the classics in our era, when the doctrine of progress
still influences the political beliefs of even the sophisticated. In such an
era it is extremely difficult for men to contemplate the possibility that
the political teachings of an ancient civilization could even be studied
seriously, let alone in the light of the possibility that they are sounder
than those of our day.
Beyond this primary task, Strauss's secondary purpose is to show that
the universal and homogeneous state, far from being the best social
order, will be (if realized) a tyranny, and therefore within classical
assumptions destructive of humanity. Modern political philosophy,
which has substituted freedom for virtue, has as its chief ideal (and an
ideal which it considers realizable) a social order which is destructive
of humanity. The relation of Strauss's second purpose to his first is evi-
dent. If the assumptions of modern political philosophy can be shown
 Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve 275

to lead to the dehumanizing of people, there is reason for scholars to

take a more careful look at classical political philosophy than has gen-
erally been the case in the age of progress.
Strauss first argues that the universal and homogeneous state will
not provide reasonable satisfaction for men, even on Hegelian assump-
tions about the objects in which men find the highest satisfaction.
Strauss points out that, according to Hegel-Kojeve, men find the high-
est satisfaction in universal recognition:

Men will have very good reasons for being dissatisfied with the universal
and homogeneous state. To show this, I must have recourse to Kojeve's
more extensive exposition in his Introduction a la kcture de Hegel. There are
degrees of satisfaction. The satisfaction of the humble citizen, whose
human dignity is universally recognized and who enjoys all opportunities
that correspond to his humble capacities and achievements, is not com-
parable to the satisfaction of the Chief of State. Only the Chief of State is
'really satisfied.' He alone is 'truly free' (146). Did Hegel not say some-
thing to the effect that the state in which one man is free is the Oriental
despotic state? Is the universal and homogeneous state then merely a
planetary Oriental despotism? However this may be, there is no guaran-
tee that the incumbent Chief of State deserves his position to a higher
degree than others. Those others then have a very good reason for dissat-
isfaction: a state which treats equal men unequally is not just. A change
from the universal-homogeneous monarchy into a universal-homoge-
neous aristocracy would seem to be reasonable. But we cannot stop here.
The universal and homogeneous state, being the synthesis of the Masters
and the Slaves, is the state of the working warrior or of the war-waging
worker. In fact, all its members are warrior workers (114, 116). But if the
state is universal and homogeneous, 'wars and revolutions are henceforth
impossible' (145, 561). Besides, work in the strict sense, namely the con-
quest or domestication of nature, is completed, for otherwise the univer-
sal and homogenous state could not be the basis for wisdom (301). Of
course, work of a kind will still go on, but the citizens of the final state will
work as little as possible, as Kojeve notes with explicit reference to Marx
(435). To borrow an expression which someone used recently in the
House of Lords on a similar occasion, the citizens of the final state are
only so-called workers, workers by courtesy, 'There is no longer fight nor
work. History has come to its end. There is nothing more to do1 (114,
385). This end of History would be most exhilarating but for the fact that,
according to Kojeve, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as
276 Thinking Their Thoughts

well as in real work or, generally expressed, the negating action, which
raises man above the brutes (378n., 490-492, 560). The state through
which man is said to become reasonably satisfied is, then, the state in
which the basis of man's humanity withers away, or in which man loses his
humanity.10

Strauss's criticism of Kojeve then proceeds to a profoimder level

with the assumption of the classical philosophers that it is in thinking
rather than in recognition that men find their fullest satisfaction. The
highest good for man is wisdom. This being so, if there is to be satisfac-
tion for all in the universal and homogeneous state, it must be that
every human being is capable of systematic philosophical thought
which alone, according to the classics, can lead to wisdom. Indeed,
Strauss affirms that the classical realization that only the few are capa-
ble of pursuing wisdom is central to the classical account of politics
and indeed of human history as a whole.

The classics thought that, owing to the weakness or dependence of

human nature, universal happiness is impossible, and therefore they did
not dream of a fulfilment of History and hence not of a meaning of His-
tory. They saw with their mind's eye a society within which that happiness
of which human nature is capable would be possible in the highest
degree: that society is the best regime. But because they saw how limited
man's power is, they held that the actualization of the best regime
depends on chance. Modern man, dissatisfied with Utopias and scorning
them, has tried to find a guarantee for the actualization of the best social
order. In order to succeed, or rather in order to be able to believe that he
could succeed, he had to lower the goal of man. One form in which this
was done was to replace moral virtue by universal recognition, or to
replace happiness by the satisfaction deriving from universal recognition.
The classical solution is Utopian in the sense that its actualization is
improbable. The modern solution is Utopian in the sense that its actual-
ization is impossible. The classic solution supplies a stable standard by
which to judge of any actual order. The modern solution eventually
destroys the very idea of a standard that is independent of actual situa-
tions

Here again one sees the combination of Strauss's two purposes. The
showing forth of the classical position as consistent combines with the
description of modern theory as including assumptions which are
 Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve 277

destructive of humanity. Here also can be seen the complex of inter-

related questions which need to be thought through if one is to judge
about the main issue of the controversy.
The classical assumptions about the dependence of man make it
clear that if the universal and homogeneous state were to be realized,
it would be a tyranny and indeed the most appalling tyranny in the
story of the race. Strauss ends his essay with a description of that tyr-
anny:

It seems reasonable to assume that only a few, if any, citizens of the uni-
versal and homogeneous state will be wise. But neither the wise men nor
the philosophers will desire to rule. For this reason alone, to say nothing
of others, the Chief of the universal and homogeneous state, or the Uni-
versal and Final Tyrant, will be an unwise man, as Kojeve seems to take for
granted. To retain his power, he will be forced to suppress every activity
which might lead people into doubt of the essential soundness of the uni-
versal and homogeneous state: he must suppress philosophy as an
attempt to corrupt the young. In particular he must in the interest of the
homogeneity of his universal state forbid every teaching, every sugges-
tion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men
which cannot be abolished or neutralized by progressing scientific tech-
nology. He must command his biologists to prove that every human being
has, or will acquire, the capacity of becoming a philosopher or a tyrant.
The philosophers in their turn will be forced to defend themselves or the
cause of philosophy. They will be obliged, therefore, to try to act on the
Tyrant. Everything seems to be a re-enactment of the age-old drama. But
this time, the cause of philosophy is lost from the start. For the Final
Tyrant presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic
authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the
executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy. He
claims therefore that he persecutes not philosophy but false philoso-
phers. The experience is not altogether new for philosophers. If philoso-
phers were confronted with claims of this kind in former ages, philosophy
went underground. It accommodated itself in its explicit or exoteric
teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believed they knew
things which they did not know. Yet its very exoteric teaching under-
mined the commands or dogmas of the rulers in such a way as to guide
the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems.
And since there was no universal state in existence, the philosophers
could escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant's
278 Thinking Their Thoughts

dominions. From the Universal Tyrant, however, there is no escape.

Thanks to the conquest of nature and to the completely unabashed sub-
stitution of suspicion and terror for law, the Universal and Final Tyrant
has at his disposal practically unlimited means for ferreting out, and for
extinguishing, the most modest efforts in the direction of thought.
Kojeve would seem to be right although for the wrong reason: the com-
ing of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy
on earth.12

NOTES

1 L. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy1? (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press 1959).
In the English version of the essay, Strauss has cut out certain passages
included in the earlier French version. These deletions do not radically
change the English version. I regret them, however, because their inclu-
sion in the French argument does bring out some of the implications in
the controversy.
2 What an author has written at one place is inevitably illumined by what he
has written at another. It is therefore impossible to write of Strauss or
Kojeve without having in mind their other writings. Nevertheless, in this
paper I will stick as much as possible to their writing about Hiero. When
their doctrine about a particular matter is taken from elsewhere, this will
be made clear in the notes.
3 On Tyranny, 1.
4 What Is Political Philosophy ? 96
5 On Tyranny, 2.
6 Ibid., 1.
7 What Is Political Philosophy? 96
8 Ibid., 273-4. The English translation of Kojeve's essay has been made by
Michael Gold. This translation has now been published with Strauss's writ-
ings on the matter. (L. Strauss, On Tyranny, revised and enlarged, Glencoe:
The Free Press 1963).
9 That the first purpose of Strauss's argument is to stress the consistency
between all aspects of classical philosophy might well have been made
clearer. The difficulty of understanding his purpose is indeed increased for
English readers by the fact that he does not include in the English edition
of his work the last paragraph of the French edition, in which his purposes
are beautifully described. Elsewhere in his writings Strauss has criticized
historicism in its late-nineteenth-century form and shown the conse-
 Friedrich Nietzsche 279

quences of such a doctrine for the scope of political science. At no point in

his writings has he, however, argued at length with Hegel's claim to have
included history within metaphysics, and with the resulting relation
between concepts and time.
10 What Is Political Philosophy H 28-9
11 Ibid., 131-2.
12 Ibid., 132-3.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Before the 1950s Friedrich Nietzsche was little known in the English-speaking
world. His writings had been celebrated by the Nazis and this taint delayed the
reception of his thought into North American academic circles. Grant's Time as
History was broadcast originally as the CBC Massey Lectures for 1969. In
them Grant praised Nietzsche's philosophy, assigning it a central place in the
history of Western thought and declaring Nietzsche to be the thinker who had
thought most profoundly about the character of modern civilization as techno-
logical. Publication of the lectures was delayed by a near-fatal car crash in
which Grant was seriously injured. Consequently, Grant's work has not received
the attention it deserved, though it has inspired several studies of Nietzsche,
mainly by Canadian political scientists.

Lately I have been reading Nietsche (?). To say that he is completely misun-
derstood by most people would be an absurd understatement. To say that he is
the forerunner to such bestiality and cruelty as the Nazis is absurd. 'I love he
whose soul is deep even for wounding and whom a slight matter may destroy.'
'Pity is the cross upon which he is nailed who loveth mankind.' That kind of
thing is not like what he is supposed to be. He uses the theory of 'the blond
animal' in utter derision yet people say that that is the basis of Nazidom.
- George Grant to Maude Grant, 14 November 1939

There is no doubt that for Plato the only rival to be taken seriously to philoso-
phy is tragic and comic poetry, and the very heart of his writings is trying to
show that philosophy takes you to the heart beyond tragic and comic poetry. In
the modern era, it seems that the rival to philosophy becomes modern physics,

Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals I, 11.

280 Thinking Their Thoughts

but it is the supreme genius of Nietzsche to see that in what he considers the
death of philosophy, what arises in its place for the greatest men is a new kind
of tragic and comic poetry.
- George Grant to Dennis Lee, 10 June 1974

My interests are in two related things: a) to understand 'technical reason'

which I think has been done at its greatest philosophically by Nietzsche and his
chief epigone Heidegger and which has been done also best by German scien-
tists, e.g. Heisenberg. b) I am interested in explicating the truth of Christianity
in relation to this height of modernity.
- George Grant to Patrick Atherton, 28 November 1974

Time as History (1969)

I have brushed against the writings of Nietzsche because he has

thought the conception of time as history more comprehensively than
any other thinker. He lays bare the fate of technical man, not as an
object held in front of us, but as that in which our very selves are
involved in the proofs of the science that lays it bare. In thinking the
modern project, he did not turn away from it. His critical wit about
modern society might lead one to believe that he condemned its
assumptions. Rather, he expressed the contradictions and difficulties
in the thought and life of Western civilization, not for the sake of turn-
ing men away from that enterprise, but so that they could overcome its
difficulties and fulfil its potential heights. In his work, the themes that
must be thought in thinking time as history are raised to a beautiful
explicitness: the mastery of human and non-human nature in experi-
mental science and technique, the primacy of the will, man as the cre-
ator of his own values, the finality of becoming, the assertion that
potentiality is higher than actuality, that motion is nobler than rest,
that dynamism rather than peace is the height. The simpler things that
Nietzsche says (for example, that men must now live without the com-
fort of horizons) seem so obvious to most people today that they are
hardly worth emphasizing. Everybody uses the word Values' to
describe our making of the world: capitalists and socialists, atheists and
avowed believers, scientists and politicians. The word comes to us so

George Grant, Time as History, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press 1995), 57-69. Used with permission.
 Friedrich Nietzsche 281

platitudinously that we take it to belong to the way things are. It is for-

gotten that before Nietzsche and his immediate predecessors, men did
not think about their actions in that language. They did not think they
made the world valuable, but that they participated in its goodness.
What is comic about the present use of 'values,' and the distinction of
them from 'facts,' is not that it is employed by modern men who know
what is entailed in so doing; but that it is used also by 'religious' believ-
ers who are unaware that in its employment they are contradicting the
very possibility of the reverence they believe they are espousing in its
use. The reading of Nietzsche would make that clear to them. Indeed,
even some of the deeper aspects of Nietzsche's thought increasingly
become explicit in our world. If one listens carefully to the revolt of
the noblest young against bourgeois America, one hears deeper notes
in it than were ever sounded by Marx, and those are above all the notes
of Nietzsche.
To repeat: the thought of great thinkers is not a matter for the chit-
chat of television and cocktail parties; nor for providing jobs for aca-
demics in the culture industry. In it the fate of our whole living is
expressed. In this sense, the thought of Nietzsche is a fate for modern
men. In partaking in it, we can come to make judgements about the
modern project - that enormous enterprise that came out of Western
Europe in the last centuries and has now become worldwide.
Nevertheless, as implied in the previous pages, the conception of
time as history is not one in which I think life can be lived properly. It
is not a conception we are fitted for. Therefore, I turn away from
Nietzsche and in so turning express my suspicion of the assumptions of
the modern project. Yet this immediately produces a difficulty. Before
speaking against Nietzsche, one must affirm the language one shares
with him, even as one negates his use of it. To illustrate: Nietzsche
clearly uses the same language as the tradition in its eternal truth,
when he says that the height for human beings is amorfati. Yet the love
of fate, which he would call redemption, is not in any sense a call to
the passivity that some moderns falsely identify with words such as
'fate' or 'destiny.' In him the love of fate is at one with his call to
dynamic willing. The love of fate is the guarantee that dynamic willing
shall be carried on by lovers of the earth, and not by those twisted by
hatred and hysteria against existing (however buried that hysteria may
be in the recesses of our instincts). Some marxists have taken his love
of fate as if it were a call to passivity as the height, and as if, therefore,
he were an essentially non-political writer. They have denied that love
282 Thinking Their Thoughts

of fate (love of the injustices and alienations and exploitations of time)

can be good. Is it not just a sufficiently deep and sustained hatred of
these iniquities that brings men to fight and to overcome them? But
Nietzsche's love of fate is not passive, but a call to dynamic political
doing. He states explicitly that any philosophy must finally be judged
in the light of its political recommendations. What he is saying beyond
many marxists is that the building of the potential height in modern
society can only be achieved by those who have overcome revenge, so
that what they accomplish comes forth from a positive love of the
earth, and not simply from hatred of what presently is. Dynamic willing
that has not overcome revenge will always have the marks of hysteria
and hatred within it. It can only produce the technical frenzy of the
nihilists or the shallow goals of the last men. It cannot come to terms
with the questions: 'what for, whither and what then?' However,
against the complacency of any easy amor fati, Nietzsche makes clear
that it must take into itself all the pain and anguish and ghastliness
that has ever been, and also the loathing of that ghastliness and pain.
Hatred against existence is, it would seem, limitless, and the more we
are aware of the nervous systems of others, the more that hatred and
hysteria must be actual or repressed for us. Only those of us who are
not much open to others can readily claim that we think existing to be
as we wanted it. Amor fati is, then, a height for men, not in the sense
that it is easily achieved or perhaps ever achieved by any human being.
The redemption that Nietzsche holds forth is not cheaply bought.
Yet having said this, I must state my simple incomprehension. How is
it possible to assert the love of fate as the height and, at the same time,
the finality of becoming? I do not understand how anybody could love
fate, unless within the details of our fates there could appear, however
rarely, intimations that they are illumined; intimations that is, of per-
fection (call it if you will God) in which our desires for good find their
rest and their fulfilment. I do not say anything about the relation of
that perfection to the necessities of existing, except that there must be
some relation; nor do I state how or when the light of that perfection
could break into the ambiguities and afflictions of any particular per-
son. I simply state the argument for perfection (sometimes called the
ontological argument): namely that human beings are not beyond
good and evil, and that the desire for good is a broken hope without
perfection, because only the desire to become perfect does in fact
make us less imperfect. This means that the absurdities of time - its
joys as well as its diremptions - are to be taken not simply as history,
 Friedrich Nietzsche 283

but as enfolded in an unchanging meaning, which is untouched by

potentiality or change. So when Nietzsche affirms that amorfati comes
forth from the contemplation of the eternity (not timelessness, but
endless time) of the creating and destroying powers of man and the
rest of nature, I do not understand how that could be a light that
would free us from the spirit of revenge. It seems to me a vision that
would drive men mad - not in the sense of a divine madness, but a
madness destructive of good.
[That we must speak of two accounts of reason, the ancient and the
modern, can be seen in the fact that for the ancients thought was at its
height, not in action, but in what they called a passion. Whatever the
differences in what came to us from Jerusalem and from Athens, on
this central point there was a commonness. The height for man was a
passion. In modern language we may weakly describe this by saying
that thought was finally a receptivity. We can see that this is not true of
modern thought because its very form is the making of hypotheses and
the testing by experiment, something intimately connected with the
acts of our wills, the controlling of the world, the making of history.
Indeed, the enormous difficulty of thinking outside the modern
account of thought is seen in my using the very word passion. Words
that once summoned up receptivity have disappeared or disintegrated
into triviality. If I were to use the noblest Greek word for this receptiv-
ity, pathos, and say, as has been said, that philosophy arises from the
pathos of astonishment, the suffering of astonishment, the word would
bear no relation to our present use of it.]
The preceding statements are not here proved or even argued.
Indeed, it is questionable how much it would be possible to argue
them in the modern world. For all those statements are made from out
of an ancient way of thinking. And to repeat: the core of the intellec-
tual history of the last centuries has been the criticism of that ancient
account of thought. As that criticism has publicly succeeded, what
comes to us from that ancient thought is generally received as unintel-
ligible and simply arbitrary. All of us are increasingly enclosed by the
modern account. For example, central to my affirmations in the previ-
ous paragraph are the propositions: the core of our lives is the desire
for perfection, and only that desire can make us less imperfect. Yet
clearly that account of 'morality' (to use a modern word) is quite dif-

*In this selection, the material in square brackets has been restored to the original pub-
lished text from the broadcast typescript.
284 Thinking Their Thoughts

ferent from what has been affirmed about morality in the last centu-
ries. The attempt to argue for my propositions would require a very
close historical analysis of how the use of such words as 'desire' and
'reason' have changed over the last centuries. It would require, for
example, what the ancients meant by 'passion.' Whatever the differ-
ences between what has come to us from Plato and from Christianity,
on this central point there is commonness. The height for man could
only come forth out of a 'passion.' Yet in using such a word, the enor-
mous difficulty of thinking outside the modern account can be seen.
When we use the word 'pathetic' we may be thinking of a defeated
character in a movie [like Ratso in Midnight Cowboy], or the perfor-
mance of the quarterback for the Hamilton Tiger Cats football team
this season. [As for the word suffering, that means simply pain, which
sensible men have always wished to avoid.] The word 'passion' has
come to be limited for us to little more than an emotion of driving
force, particularly intense sexual excitement. [The experiences of
receptivity having dropped from our vocabulary, we think of art and
thought and morality quite differently. We talk of what the artist does
as creation, not as imitation, a begetting on the beautiful.] To say that
philosophy arises from the suffering of astonishment would bear no
relation to our present understanding of thought, because the arche-
type of thought is now that science that frames instrumental hypothe-
ses and tests them in experiment, a kind of willing. How can we think
of 'morality' as a desiring attention to perfection, when for the last
centuries the greatest moral philosophers have written of it as self-
legislation, the willing of our own values? Therefore, my affirmations
in the previous paragraph use language in a way that can hardly be
appropriated. [As an example of the poverty of modern language, let
me say how partial it is to speak of Tolstoy as creating War and Peace, or
Mozart his piano concertos. The disappearance of the words of recep-
tivity, the words of passion, from the modern account of thought,
shows what a wide separation there is between the ancient and the
modern. It clarifies what it means to say that modern thinking is always
a kind of willing. Because we are always surrounded in every conscious
minute of our lives by the modern conception of thought, we cannot
take what is given to us from the past as intelligible. If we take it at all,
we take it more and more as sheerly arbitrary. Therefore, fewer and
fewer people can appropriate it.]
Indeed, beyond this, there is a further turn of the screw for anybody
who would assert that amor fati is the height, yet cannot understand
 Friedrich Nietzsche 285

how that height could be achievable outside the vision of our fate as
enfolded in a timeless eternity. The destruction of the idea of such an
eternity has been at the centre of the modern project in the very scien-
tific and technical mastery of chance. As a great contemporary, Leo
Strauss, has written in What Is Political Philosophy: 'Oblivion of eternity,
or, in other words, estrangement from man's deepest desire and there-
with from the primary issues, is the price that modern man had to pay,
from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to
become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.' And the
turn of the screw is that to love fate must obviously include loving the
fate that makes us part of the modern project; it must include loving
that which has made us oblivious of eternity - that eternity without
which I cannot understand how it would be possible to love fate.
To put the matter simply: any appeal to the past must not be made
outside a full recognition of the present. Any use of the past that insu-
lates us from living now is cowardly, trivializing, and at worst despair-
ing. Antiquarianism can be used like most other drugs as mind
contracting. If we live in the present we must know that we live in a civ-
ilization, the fate of which is to conceive time as history. Therefore, as
living now, the task of thought among those held by something that
cannot allow them to make the complete 'yes' to time as history, is not
to inoculate themselves against their present, but first to enter what is
thought in that present.
What has happened in the West since 1945 concerning the thought
of Marx is an example of inoculation. Our chief rival empire has been
ruled by men who used Marx's doctrine as their official language,
while we used an earlier form of modernity, the liberalism of capitalist
democracy. The thought of Marx, therefore, appeared as a threaten-
ing and subverting disease. The intellectual industry in our multiversi-
ties produced a spate of refutations of Marx. Most of these, however,
were written with the purpose of inoculating others against any conta-
gion, rather than with thinking the thoughts that Marx had thought.
These books have not prevented the reviving influence of Marx's
thought among many of the brightest young, anymore than the official
marxism of the East has been able to stop the influence of existential-
ism among its young elites. [Why? Marx's thought abides because he
thought some of what is happening in the modern world. His writings
could therefore help other men to think about what was happening.
What we were doing in Vietnam seemed to be explained by marxism.]
Men may have to attempt this inoculation if they are concerned with
286 Thinking Their Thoughts

the stability of a particular society, but it is well to know when one is

doing it that it is not concerned directly with philosophy but with pub-
lic stability. And you will not even be successful at inoculating those
most important to inoculate, if you pretend you understand Marx
when you do not. To apply the comparison: when I state that I do not
understand how Nietzsche could assert amorfati to be the height, while
at the same time asserting the finality of becoming, my purpose is not
to inoculate against Nietzsche. [As I have said, Nietzsche thinks what it
is to be a modern man more comprehensively, more deeply, than any
other thinker, including Marx, including Freud, including the existen-
tialists, including the positivists. Therefore, the first task of somebody
trying to think time as history is not to inoculate, but to think his
thoughts.] The task of inoculation is best left to those who write text-
books. [Yet if I am right that in the thought of Nietzsche we drink most
deeply of the modern experiment, we cannot finally avoid making
some judgments of that experiment, and so of that thought. We might
start from our current experience, and argue that since Nietzsche's
day more evidence is in. As one looks at the vulgar and chaotic results
of our modern dynamism, it is possible to say that the modern project
has led men away from excellence, and that this debasement is not
accidental, but comes forth from the very assumptions of that project.
Then one would say that these debasements are not to be overcome by
a further extension of the modern assumptions, as Nietzsche would
have it. If one denies the possibility of any returning to the past, and
yet does not believe in the assumptions of the modern experiment,
what then is the task of thought?]
What then could be the position of those who cannot live through
time as if it were simply history, who cannot believe that love of fate
could be achieved together with the assertion of the finality of becom-
ing, and yet must live in the dynamism of our present society? In that
position there is a call to remembering and to loving and to thinking.
What I mean by remembering was expressed for me by a friend who
died recently. He knew that he was dying, not in the sense that we all
know that this is going to happen sometime. He knew it because a
short term had been put upon his life at an early age, long before what
he was fitted for could be accomplished. Knowing that he lived in the
close presence of his own death, he once said shortly: T do not accept
Nietzsche.' Clearly such a remark was not intended to express a real-
ized refutation of Nietzsche. Neither he nor I saw ourselves capable of
that magisterial task. He had collected (at a time when such collecting
 Friedrich Nietzsche 287

must have been pressed upon him) what had been given him about
the unfathomable goodness of the whole, from his good fortune in
having partaken in a tradition of reverence. In the inadequate modern
equivalent for reverence and tradition, his remark might be called
'religious.'
In an age when the primacy of the will, even in thinking, destroys
the varied forms of reverence, they must come to us, when and if they
come, from out of tradition. 'Tradition' means literally a handing
over; or, as it once meant, a surrender. The man who was dying was in
his remark surrendering to me his recollection of what had been sur-
rendered to him, from the fortune that had been his, in having lived
within a remembered reverence - in his case, Christianity. [He surren-
dered to me the affirmation that the whole is in some unfathomable
sense good. The absurdities of time, indeed also its joys as well as its
diremptions, are to be taken not simply as history but as enfolded in a
meaning (call it if you will a transcendence) that is beyond potential-
ity, that is beyond change. I do not imply that what is handed over in
tradition must be in conflict with reason or experience. The belief that
reason and tradition are at loggerheads is only a product of modern
thought. It comes from the doctrine of progress, that the race as a
whole is becoming increasingly open to reason by shuffling off its irra-
tional past. The traditions that came to us from Athens and Jerusalem
claim to be, in the main, reasonable, but what was handed over in
them is now accepted, if accepted at all, less and less as thought-filled
because it is so assailed by the modern account of reason, and all of us
are increasingly enclosed by that modern account. The core of the his-
tory of the last three hundred years has been the criticism of the
ancient account of thought and the coming to be of the new account.
As that criticism has publicly succeeded what comes to us from the past
is received as unintelligible, as simply arbitrary.] In the presence of
death, my friend had collected out of that remembrance an assertion
for me that stated how he transcended conceiving time as history.
By distinguishing remembering from thinking, I do not imply that
this collecting was unthoughtful, but that what this man had there col-
lected could not have been entirely specified in propositions. For
nearly everyone (except perhaps for the occasional great thinkers)
there is no possibility of entirely escaping that which is given in the
public realm, and this increasingly works against the discovery of any
reverence. Therefore, those of us who at certain times look to grasp
something beyond history must search for it as the remembering of a
288 Thinking Their Thoughts

negated tradition and not as a direct thinking of our present. Perhaps

reverence belongs to man qua man and is indeed the matrix of human
nobility. But those several conceptions, being denied in our present
public thought, can themselves only be asserted after they have been
sought for through the remembrance of the thought of those who
once thought them.
Remembering must obviously be a disciplined activity in a civiliza-
tion where the institutions that should foster it do not. One form of it
may be scholarship, the study of what the past has given us. But schol-
arship of itself need not be remembering. The scholar may so hold out
from himself what is given from the past (that is, so objectify it) that he
does not in fact remember it. There are scholars, for example, who
have learnt much of the detailed historical and literary background of
the Bible, and yet who remember less of what was essentially given in
those books than Jews or Christians untutored in such scholarship.
This is no argument against the necessity of disciplined scholarship. It
is simply the statement that modern scholarship has to hold itself
above the great gulf of progressive assumptions, if it is to be more than
antiquarian technique and become remembering.
It may also be said that 'remembering' is a misleading word, because
we should turn not only to our own origins in Athens and Jerusalem,
but to those of the great civilizations of the East. Many young North
Americans are learning from Asia, because of the barrenness of their
own traditions. Indeed, many have only been able to look at their own
past because they have first been grasped by something in Asia. It is
hardly necessary for a member of a department of religion, such as
myself, to assert that it can be a great good for Western people in their
time of darkness to contemplate the sources of thought and life as they
have been in the East. But that meeting will be only a kind of esoteric
game, if it is undertaken to escape the deepest roots of Western fate.
We can only come to any real encounter with Asia, if we come in some
high recognition of what we inevitably are. I use the word 'remember-
ing' because, wherever else we turn, we cannot turn away from our
own fate, which came from our original openings to comedy and trag-
edy, to thought and charity, to anxiety and shame.
As remembering can only be carried on by means of what is handed
over to us, and as what is handed over is a confusion of truth and fal-
sity, remembering is clearly not self-sufficient. Any tradition, even if it
be the vehicle by which perfection itself is brought to us, leaves us with
the task of appropriating from it, by means of loving and thinking, that
 Friedrich Nietzsche 289

which it has carried to us. Individuals, even with the help of their pres-
ently faltering institutions, can grasp no more than very small seg-
ments of what is there. Nor (to repeat) should any dim apprehensions
of what was meant by perfection before the age of progress be used
simply as means to negate what may have been given us of truth and
goodness in this age. The present darkness is a real darkness, in the
sense that the enormous corpus of logistic and science of the last cen-
turies is unco-ordinate as to any possible relation it may have to those
images of perfection that are given us in the Bible and in philosophy.
We must not forget that new potentialities of reasoning and making
happen have been actualized (and not simply contemplated as mis-
trusted potentialities, as for example in Plato) and therefore must be
thought as having been actualized, in relation to what is remembered.
The conception of time as history is not to be discarded as if it had
never been.
It may be that at any time or place, human beings can be opened to
the whole in their loving and thinking, even as its complete intelligibil-
ity eludes them. If this be true of any time or place, then one is not,
after all, trapped in historicism. But now the way to intelligibility is
guarded by a more than usual number of ambiguities. Our present is
like being lost in the wilderness, when every pine and rock and bay
appears to us as both known and unknown, and therefore as uncertain
pointers on the way back to human habitation. The sun is hidden by
the cloud and the usefulness of our ancient compasses has been put in
question. Even what is beautiful - which for most men has been the
pulley to lift them out of despair - has been made equivocal for us
both in detail and definition. [The very bringing into being of our civi-
lization has put in question the older means of finding one's way, with-
out discovering new means for doing so. Nevertheless, it is also clear
that this very position of ambiguity in our civilization presents enor-
mous hope for thought, if not for life. The questions whether the mod-
ern project opens out new heights for man, or whether at its heart it
was a false turning for man, is so clearly before us. Questions that were
settled, and therefore closed over the last centuries, are now open to
us once again. Perhaps the essential question about the modern
project is not that of Nietzsche - Who deserve to be the masters of the
earth? - but the very question of mastery itself]
Nevertheless, those who cannot live as if time were history are called,
beyond remembering, to desiring and thinking. But this is to say very
little. For myself, as probably for most others, remembering only occa-
290 Thinking Their Thoughts

sionally can pass over into thinking and loving what is good. It is for
the great thinkers and the saints to do more.

Nietzsche's View of Socrates (1977 )*

The subject matter of this book is of central significance for those who
study political philosophy. Socrates is the primal figure for that
uniquely Western activity. More than any other modern thinker,
Nietzsche placed Socrates at the centre of Western history as the cre-
ator of rationalism, and claimed in his own thought to have overcome
that rationalism. Therefore, in Nietzsche's view of Socrates we are near
the centre of thinking about the nature of political philosophy. For
somebody from outside the U.S.A. (such as myself) it is a happiness to
find that a professor of government at Cornell should devote his
thought to so central a subject for our Western self-understanding.
I am even happier to say that Professor Dannhauser's book is very
well done. He has read Nietzsche's writings carefully and comprehen-
sively; he has also read the accounts of Socrates which are given us in
Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. Because of the political and eco-
nomic conflicts between the English-speaking and German peoples in
the last generations, English-speakers have not paid sufficient atten-
tion to modern German philosophers - the greatest of whom is
Nietzsche. Now that Nietzsche is becoming powerful in our society
(particularly among the young) his influence often comes to us in the
form of a quick and one-sided apperception of his teachings. Indeed,
Nietzsche's enchanting (if terrible) rhetoric encourages that one-sid-
edness. Therefore, Dannhauser's care must be highly praised. He has
obviously read Nietzsche over many years and knows the extensive and
complex corpus intimately. This is a scholarly book in the best sense of
that term. The form of this book is to trace carefully Nietzsche's view
of Socrates from the early writings, when Nietzsche was taken up with
positivism and modern science, to the last writings where his final
encounter with Socrates is put before us. Dannhauser wisely leaves to a
separate chapter what Nietzsche says by implication about Socrates in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He treats with proper caution the endless irony
of the ambiguous speeches which largely make up that work.

'George Grant, review of Werner J. Dannhauser's Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press 1974), in American Political Science Review, vol. 71 (1977), 1127-9.
 Friedrich Nietzsche 291

One great quality of Dannhauser's book is that it is unpretentious.

By that I mean that his personality does not get in the way of laying
before us clearly and carefully what Nietzsche is saying. The book is
concerned with Socrates and Nietzsche, not with himself. This is a
pleasure these days, when so many books about politics that pass
beyond the simply 'objective' seem to be mostly an exposition of the
author's personality and problems. If one wants to follow accurately
the details of Nietzsche's changing view of Socrates, this book holds
the subject together with accurate care. This is what the book is: a lucid
exposition of a central (perhaps the central) issue of modern philoso-
phy and therefore of political philosophy.
The present influence of Nietzsche in the U.S. owes much to Profes-
sor Walter Kaufmann of Princeton University, because of his extensive
translations and his long book about Nietzsche's life and thought. This
has been useful in the sense that Kaufmann has helped to free English-
speakers from the picture of Nietzsche as a wild poet of nihilism, who
politically was the precursor of the horrors of National Socialism. Kauf-
mann has destroyed amongst us, surely finally, the impression that
Nietzsche somehow took part in the tradition of German anti-Semit-
ism. He lays Nietzsche before us as the chief influence upon European
existentialism and as a thinker who laid the foundations of what Freud
was later to think. In that sense, the influence of Kaufmann's work has
been salutary. On the other hand, Kaufmann has presented Nietzsche
as if to make the latter's writings open and palatable to the social-dem-
ocratic world of American academia. He has done this by presenting
Nietzsche first and foremost as the expositor of what is assumed in
modern society, rather than as the thinker who wants to overcome
what stands against human nobility in the modern world. Kaufmann
treats vaguely what Nietzsche took as his 'most abysmal' teaching, 'the
eternal recurrence of the identical.' In short, Kaufmann does not take
Nietzsche altogether seriously.
What makes Dannhauser's book welcome is that he takes Nietz-
sche's thought at the highest level of seriousness. For example, he
confronts the fact that 'the eternal recurrence' is claimed by Nietzsche
to be at the centre of what he teaches, and therefore cannot be put
aside as some kind of ecstatic extra. This is to say that although Dan-
nhauser is finally less persuaded by Nietzsche than is Kaufmann, he
nevertheless treats Nietzsche as a greater thinker than does Kauf-
mann. It is indeed because Dannhauser (as he shows himself in his last
pages) is a lover of Socrates, that he is able to treat Nietzsche deeply -
292 Thinking Their Thoughts

namely as the most lucid of all teachers of historicism. As Socrates is

the supreme Western figure who taught that historicism can be tran-
scended, Nietzsche's account of Socrates must be understood, if one is
to look at the problems of historicism clearly. As historicism appears to
be the fundamental presupposition of the dominant North American
social science, Dannhauser's book is important in our present intellec-
tual situation. I mean by 'historicism' the teaching that all thought is
determined by belonging to a concrete dynamic context. If our con-
temporary academia is to face its main task, which is to try to under-
stand the recent state of our intellectual tradition, this must include
the understanding of Nietzsche's writing as it is, in all its greatness, as
the work of a thinker who not only assailed Western rationalism, but
claimed to have overcome it. Because Dannhauser's book deals with
these central issues in Nietzsche's view of Socrates, it takes us to a
more philosophic stage of Nietzschean scholarship in the U.S.A. His
work is on the level of the best writing about Nietzsche in Germany
and France since 1945.
When one admires a book, it is likely to sound ungrateful to men-
tion extra things one wishes the book had done. Nevertheless there are
three points I could wish had been developed further:
(a) Dannhauser does not seem to discuss sufficiently what Nietzsche
says about Socrates and Platonism in Beyond Good and Evil. Dann-
hauser's chief acknowledgment is to the late Leo Strauss as a teacher.
One of Strauss's last published writings was an article on how to read
Beyond Good and Evil. Perhaps it is Dannhauser's respect for that writ-
ing which has made him decide to give Beyond Good and Evil a less cen-
tral place than in my opinion it deserves.
(b) I wish Dannhauser had said more about Heidegger's work,
Nietzsche. In my opinion this is the greatest book of commentary on a
philosopher which has been produced in our age. Dannhauser's
interpretation of Nietzsche refers to it several times, but does not deal
with Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche at length. Perhaps this
would have made his book too complex, and taken away from the
fine clarity of his writing. It would have become a book not only on
Socrates and Nietzsche, but on Heidegger, Socrates, and Nietzsche.
Nevertheless, one is aware from this book that Dannhauser is capa-
ble of writing about Heidegger's interpretation, and one wishes
that he had. After all, Heidegger's historicism is the supreme contem-
porary understanding of what is implied in the acceptance of that
teaching.
 Friedrich Nietzsche 293

(c) Most important. In the last pages of his book, where he makes
clear that he is a follower of Socrates and not of Nietzsche, Dan-
nhauser writes: Nietzsche's 'critique of dogmatisms and systems may
hit Hegel, but it misses Socrates and Plato; and many of the attacks on
reason, rationality, and rationalism may hit Descartes, but they miss
Socrates and Plato' (p. 272). I wish Dannhauser had greatly expanded
this passage, and said why this is so. However difficult such questions
are, it is to be hoped that Dannhauser will turn to them in subsequent
writings. In this book he presents us with plenty of evidence that he is
capable of casting light on these extraordinarily complex issues.

Nietzsche and the Ancients (1979)

Part II

There is no escape from reading Nietzsche if one would understand

modernity. Some part of his whole meets us whenever we listen to what
our contemporaries are saying when they speak as moderns. The
words come forth from those who have never heard of him, and from
those who could not concentrate sufficiently to read philosophy seri-
ously. A hundred years ago Nietzsche first spoke what is now explicit in
Western modernity. When we speak of morality as concerned with 'val-
ues,' of politics in the language of sheer 'decision,' of artists as 'cre-
ative,' of 'quality of life' as praise and excuse for the manifold forms of
human engineering, we are using the language first systematically
thought by Nietzsche. At the political level his thought appears appro-
priately among the atheists of the right; but equally (if less appropri-
ately) it is on the lips of the atheists of the left. When we speak of our
universities beyond the sphere of exact scientific technologies, what
could better express the general ethos than Nietzsche's remark: 'Per-
haps I have experience of nothing else but that art is worth more than
truth.' And, of course, radical historicism is everywhere in our intellec-
tual life. It even begins to penetrate the self-articulation of the mathe-
maticized sciences.
In such circumstances there is need to read Nietzsche and perhaps
to teach him. One must read him as the great clarion of the modern,

George Grant, 'Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship,' Dionysius 3
(December), 5-16 (reprinted in 1986).
294 Thinking Their Thoughts

conscious of itself. If the question of reading Nietzsche is inescapable,

the question of whether and how and to whom he should be taught is a
more complex matter. It is particularly difficult for somebody such as
myself, who in political philosophy is above all a lover of Plato within
Christianity. The following story is relevant. A man with philosophic
eros was recently asked the rather silly question: 'At what period of
time would you best like to have lived?' He answered that he was lucky
to have lived in the present period, because the most comprehensive
and deepest account of the whole has been given us by Plato, and the
most comprehensive criticism of that account has been given us by
Nietzsche. In the light of that criticism, one can the better understand
the depth of Platonic teaching. That is, one should teach Nietzsche as
the great critic of Plato. The difficulty of reading Plato today is that
one is likely to read him through the eyes of some school of modern
philosophy, and this can blind one. For example, many moderns have
in the last century and a half followed Kant's remark in the first Cri-
tique that he was combining an Epicurean science with a Platonic
account of morality. With such spectacles how much of Plato must be
excluded? The great advantage of Nietzsche is that such strange com-
binations are not present. His criticism of Plato is root and branch. In
the light of it the modern student may break through to what the Pla-
tonic teaching is in itself.
Nevertheless, the teacher who is within the philosophic and reli-
gious tradition, and who also takes upon himself the grave responsibil-
ity of teaching Nietzsche, must do so within an explicit understanding
with those he teaches that he rejects Nietzsche's doctrine. If I were not
afraid of being taken as an innocent dogmatist, I would have written
that one should teach Nietzsche within the understanding that he is a
teacher of evil. The justification of such a harsh position is difficult,
particulary in universities such as ours in which liberalism has become
little more than the pursuit of Value-free' scholarship. This harsh posi-
tion is clearly not 'value-free.' Moreover, such a position is ambiguous
in the light of the fact that I do not find myself able to answer compre-
hensively the genius who was the greatest critic of Plato. But there is no
need to excuse myself. Who has been able to give a refutation of radi-
cal historicism that is as able to convince our wisest scientific and schol-
arly friends?
Without such capability, what is it to say that one should teach within

Leo Strauss.
 Friedrich Nietzsche 295

the rejection of Nietzsche? Is not this the very denial of that openness
to the whole which is the fundamental mark of the philosophic enter-
prise? Is it not to fall back into that dogmatic closedness which is one
form of enmity to philosophy? I will attempt to answer that by discuss-
ing Nietzsche's teaching concerning justice. As a political philosopher
within Christianity, my willingness to teach Nietzsche within an under-
standing of rejection, while at the same time I am not capable of the
complete refutation of his historicism, turns around my inability to
accept as true his account of justice. At least we need have no doubts as
to what Nietzsche's conception of justice is, and the consequences of
accepting it.
A caveat is necessary at this point in the argument. I am not making
the mistake that is prevalent in much condemnation of Nietzsche -
namely that there is no place for justice in his doctrine. His teaching
about justice is at the very core of what he is saying. To understand it is
as fundamental as to understand the teaching concerning 'the eternal
recurrence of the identical.' It is said unequivocally in a fragment writ-
ten in 1885, towards the end of his life as writer: 'It happened late that
I came upon what up to that time had been totally missing, namely jus-
tice. What is justice and is it possible? If it should not be possible, how
would life be supportable? This is what I increasingly asked myself.
Above all it filled me with anguish to find, when I delved into myself,
only violent passions, only private perspectives, only lack of reflection
about this matter. What I found in myself lacked the very primary con-
ditions for justice.'
This quotation does not give content to Nietzsche's conception of
justice. Its nature appears in two quotations from the unpublished
fragments of 1884. 'Justice as function of a power with all encircling
vision, which sees beyond the little perspectives of good and evil, and
so has a wider advantage, having the aim of maintaining something
which is more than this or that person.' Or again: 'Justice as the build-
ing, rejecting, annihilating way of thought which proceeds from the
appraisement of value: highest representative of life itself.'
What is the account of justice therein given? What is it to see
'beyond the little perspectives of good and evil'; to maintain 'some-
thing which is more than this or that person?' What is 'the building,
rejecting, annihilating way of thought?' What is being said here about
the nature of justice would require above all an exposition of why the
superman, when he is able to think the eternal recurrence of the iden-
tical, will be the only noble ruler for a technological age, and what he
296 Thinking Their Thoughts

must be ready to do to 'the last men' who will have to be ruled. That
exposition cannot be given in the space of an article. Suffice it to speak
popularly: what is given in these quotations is an account of justice as
the human creating of quality of life. And is it not clear by now what
are the actions which follow from such an account? It was not acciden-
tal that Nietzsche should write of 'the merciless extinction' of large
masses in the name of justice, or that he should have thought 'eugeni-
cal experimentation' necessary to the highest modern justice. And in
thinking of these consequences, one should not concentrate alone on
their occurrence during the worst German regime, which was luckily
beaten in battle. One should relate them to what is happening in the
present Western regimes. We all know that mass feticide is taking place
in our societies. We all should know the details of the eugenical exper-
imentation which is taking place in all the leading universities of the
Western world. After all, many of us are colleagues in those universi-
ties. We should be clear that the language used to justify such activities
is the language of the human creating of quality of life, beyond the lit-
tle perspectives of good and evil.
One must pass beyond an appeal to immediate consequences in
order to state what is being accepted with Nietzsche's historicist
account of justice. What does a proper conception of justice demand
from us in our dealings with others? Clearly there are differences here
between the greatest ancient and modern philosophers. The tradition
of political thought originating in Rousseau and finding different ful-
filments in Kant and Hegel demands a more substantive equality than
is asked in Plato or Aristotle. What Hegel said about the influence of
Christianity towards that change is indubitably true. But the difference
between the ancients and the moderns as to what is due to all human
beings should not lead us to doubt that in the rationalist traditions,
whether ancient or modern, something at least is due to all others,
whether we define them as rational souls or rational subjects. What-
ever may be given in Plato's attack on democracy in his Republic, it is
certainly not that for some human beings nothing is due. Indeed, to
understand Plato's account of justice, we must remember the relation
in his thought between justice and the mathematical conception of
equality.
In Nietzsche's conception of justice there are other human beings
to whom nothing is due — other than extermination. The human creat-
ing of quality of life beyond the little perspectives of good and evil by a
building, rejecting, annihilating way of thought is the statement that
 Martin Heidegger 297

politics is the technology of making the human race greater than it has
yet been. In that artistic accomplishment, those of our fellows who
stand in the way of that quality can be exterminated or simply
enslaved. There is nothing intrinsic in all others that puts any given
limit on what we may do to them in the name of that great enterprise.
Human beings are so unequal in quality that to some of them no due is
owed. What gives meaning in the fact of historicism is that willed
potentiality is higher than any actuality. Putting aside the petty per-
spectives of good and evil means that there is nothing belonging to all
human beings which need limit the building of the future. Oblivion of
eternity is here not a liberal-aesthetic stance, which still allows men to
support regimes the principles of which came from those who had
affirmed eternity; oblivion of eternity here realizes itself politically.
One should not flirt with Nietzsche for the purposes of this or that
area of science or scholarship, but teach him in the full recognition
that his thought presages the conception of justice which more and
more unveils itself in the technological West.

NOTE

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, NachgelasseneFragmente 1884.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976)

Grant considered Martin Heidegger the greatest philosopher of the twentieth cen-
tury. Heidegger's early masterpiece, Being and Time (1927), was the most
influential existentialist work. However, in the 1930s, Heidegger joined the Nazi
Party and his refusal to repudiate his membership after the war or to comment on
the Holocaust made him an extremely controversial figure. Grant first took an
interest in Heidegger in the late 1950s, but his meditations on Heidegger became
central to his thought after the translation into French of Heidegger's four-vol-
ume study on Nietzsche. Heidegger's writings on technology influenced much of
Grant's thinking on technology in the 1970s, and Grant returned to these vol-
umes when David Krell's English translation was published in the early 1980s.
At the time of his death, Grant had begun work on a book to defend Plato against
Heidegger's attack.
298 Thinking Their Thoughts

I have found in Martin Heidegger, the most famous of the German existential-
ists - indeed, the founder of existentialism as a philosophic movement - an
interpretation of Greek philosophy which is very similar to some of the remarks
I have been making this year. Not in his early works - but in his later works
which are only now becoming available. What he says at great length and great
subtlety is that Western thought has floated out upon a great tide of nihilism,
and the origin of that nihilism is what happened to philosophy somewhere
between the time of Parmenides and Plato. For Parmenides, being and aware-
ness were one, and according to Heidegger human existence was rooted in that
oneness; man was deep in Being, drew his life from the appearance of Being,
which was truly appearance, not illusion; for the being of Being was again at
one with Being, not the mere flux which modern interpretations of Heraclitus
have led us to think it was.
What he is saying is that all our traditional separations like subject/object,
substance/accident, etc. - in fact all the words we use to talk about philosophi-
cal problems - are so many veils over Being, so many chasms between ourselves
and Being. To understand the pre-Socratic insight we must penetrate far into
the first roots of our own language, cutting out all the deceiving growth of the
centuries. For the pre-Socratics, truth was what Heidegger calls the unhidden-
ness of Being.
- George Grant, notes for a lecture, Dalhousie 1958

The question of importance is whether Heidegger's teaching is true. But we

must be careful in facing that question too unreservedly, for the reason that
here undoubtedly one is faced with a thinker of the highest order - so that one
must be hesitant of one's own ability to judge.
What I fear in much North American education is the tendency to put even
the very great into neat pigeon holes, and therefore put them safely away. This
is part of 'technological' training. The thinker in question is placed at our dis-
posal, like standing reserve, and is made accessible to us.
Let me say why I think this is dangerous with Heidegger, for two reasons:
(a) There are parts in Heidegger which are not accessible to me - I might add,
as yet. For example I am coming a bit to understand what he means by Sein (to
be) - but certainly not entirely.
(b) Second, and more important: what he has said about modern science has
been staggeringly illuminating and I know that the truth which he has there
laid before me I would never have understood if he had not shown me. For
example, his writing on Leibniz - Der Satz vom Grund - the principle of reason,
where he shows that that principle is central to the modern, scientific techno-
logical enterprise, has just made me understand the technological society as no
other writing.
 Martin Heidegger 299

Another example: his exposition of what Nietzsche is thinking in the eternal

recurrence in the first volume of his Nietzsche (Krell) - till I read that exposi-
tion I do not think I had ever known what was really thought in what Nietzsche
calls his 'most abysmal thought.'
- George Grant, notes for a lecture, McMaster University 1978

I have been reading parts of Heidegger - what a master. Above all (in my
own way) I would like to write like that. He seems not to be writing about
things, but to summon up directly the things themselves, as if he was not
thinking about what others had thought about things, but about the things
themselves.
- George Grant to William Christian, 1982

I spend a great deal of life reading Heidegger. He is certainly the greatest phi-
losopher of the modern era. Perhaps with the collapse of Europe, because of
the last wars, he is the last philosopher, as philosophy is so essentially a western
phenomenon. He is, of course, an ultimately modern philosopher & if I can
summon the courage I would like to write an account of why his criticism of
Plato is not true. But I doubt that I will ever have the skill to do it. One thing
that makes it so difficult is that he is such a remarkable commentator on the
history of philosophy. Of all the great German philosophers he is the only one
who was by origin Catholic. If you ever feel any desire to read him, I think the
best way is either through his book on Leibniz The Principle of Reason or
through 'The Question concerning Technique.' I don't think Sein und Zeit is
the best because that is the classic account of existentialism & he spent the rest
of his life writing where he thought that inadequate.
- George Grant to Peter Self, 1987

For myself it is only in the last two decades that I have been ready to bring
Heidegger into my writings. He is, after all, a very consummate thinker and
also very prolific writer. It took me years to find the time to read H. compre-
hensively. The Nietzsche book is now the catalyst to write a longer piece
directly about him. Let me say clearly that H. must be for me a writer who ridi-
cules Christianity Sc therefore, to write about him is to say a great 'NO.' His
criticism of Plato is related to his ridicule of Christianity, but that is not of the
same centrality for me. His Nietzsche book has been a great catalyst for me as it
has come out in English.
- George Grant to John Siebert, 29 June 1988

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row 1979-87).
300 Thinking Their Thoughts

Interview on Martin Heidegger (1986)

Cayley: Earlier in our interview you described Martin Heidegger as the

consummate thinker of our age. Why?
Grant In his first great book, Being and Time - and there you have his-
toricism right in the title, don't you? - Heidegger describes man as a
being towards death. He says that human beings, insofar as they are
conscious, are the beings who at every moment of their lives know they
are going to die. Death is a temporal event and he is saying, I think
with enormous clarity, that the centre of the modern world is choice,
anxiety about death, and extreme individualism. All thought arises
from the concrete, dynamic situation of the individual. This is what he
says in Being and Time, and what I have called historicism. Now, I would
say - and this is just my judgment - that since his experience with
National Socialism and his experience of the war and the smashing of
Europe in the war, all of his later thought has been an attempt to
escape from this historicism. When I talk about historicism I think of it
as just an expression of existentialism. Existentialism is the least of it;
and when you think of the philosophic movement called existentialism
the rest are nowhere compared to Heidegger. In a certain sense, Sartre
is just a plagiarist of Heidegger. They're all little people who've just
borrowed bits from Heidegger.
For Germany, existentialism was intellectually what National Social-
ism was politically. I'm not saying that Heidegger was trying to free
himself from guilt or anything - that's not Heidegger at all. He had
other reasons for trying to say what the limits of existentialism are in
his writing since 1945. Right after the war, when he was prevented from
teaching in Germany by the Allied forces and the French were longing
to see him, the first thing he wrote was a letter to a French friend,
called 'A Letter on Humanism.' There he expresses most wonderfully
his dissatisfaction with existentialism as a category and says he wants to
try to go on thinking. He doesn't say that this great and wonderful
book Being and Time is wrong but he says he wants to say more.
I'm trying to express this in a spirit of fairness to Heidegger because
he's been so abused in the Western world. This was a very great genius
- I have no doubt at all that he is the great philosopher of the modern
era. For myself, for instance, nobody has spoken so wonderfully about

David Cayley, George, Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995).

 Martin Heidegger 301

what technology is, and seen it with prodigious attention. I mean mod-
ern in the sense that there wasn't anything like what we call technology
in the ancient world. There was technique, and there were arts, but
technology is essentially a modern phenomenon, and it is to me the
overwhelming phenomenon. Heidegger expressed this in a marvelous
way when people asked him about capitalism and communism, and he
said that capitalism and communism are just predicates of the subject
technology. I think that is true. They make a difference; they are pred-
icates and they are very different predicates. One can speak very pro-
foundly against communism and, indeed, speak very profoundly
against capitalism and their different vices; but I think Heidegger has
seen that the essential event of Western civilization at its end is mod-
ern technology, which is now becoming worldwide.
Cayley: Heidegger, in a very beautiful passage, says that we're 'too late
for the gods and too early for being.' 'Being's poem, which is man,' he
says, 'has just begun.' So 'we must be claimed by being, we must be will-
ing to dwell in the nameless.' And this reminds me of your own insis-
tence that we must be willing to really experience the darkness of our
time, and listen for what you have called 'intimations of deprival.'
Grant I have to say that, for me, this is like talking about Mozart: I am
honoured when you say I share anything with Heidegger, but here one
is in the presence of genius I could never be near, and I must say that.
Heidegger does say that 'we're too late for the gods,' but he also said
towards the end, 'Only a god will save us.' Now, in the Western world,
if you use an article before God, you're not talking about the god of
the Bible, who is just God. You're talking about gods, in the sense that
Apollo was a great god; and I think Apollo was a great god, and not
just, as we now say, a 'myth.' Now, I think it is indubitably true that
Heidegger is in some sense reaching for polytheism again. When he
says we are too late for the gods, he does agree that we are too late; but
in a way he is hoping, because he thinks that polytheism, the return to
the gods, would be a wonderful thing.
I can't really speak about this without coming back to technology
because it seems to me he is speaking about passing outside the posi-
tion where everything is an object and our relation to it is to summon
it before us to give us its reasons. What he means by 'being here' is very
close in a certain sense to the ancient tradition, expressed not just in
Christianity but in India, and in a different way in China, and the Med-
iterranean world. He is speaking against a view of life in which we are
totally summed up in technology, in which all our relations are rela-
302 Thinking Their Thoughts

dons to objects which we summon before us to give us their reasons.

He's speaking against everything being controlled, and in favour of
waiting upon what is. We must not stand before what is in the relation
of subjects who want to control objects. We must be open to what is
and wait upon it. This is not so much said in Sein und Zeit, where he just
lays down existentialism with consummate, extraordinary brilliance,
but in the later works where he turns to the very great German poet
Holderlin. The poets are those who listen to what is. This is the point
of his quotations from Mozart. It's all the language of participation in
the later Heidegger, in his attempt to say not that existentialism is not
true but that one must pass beyond it. I think he was very appalled by
the existentialist movement and its silliness.
Cayley: He quotes from Holderlin the line, 'Where the danger is grows
the saving power also.' He seems to feel that in our extremity a god will
appear, because the nature of the extremity opens us to being. Is this a
view that you share with him?
Grant Yes, certainly, if one says that this polytheism is in some sense
within Christianity, and all I mean by within Christianity is allowing the
Gospels to be present and allowing philosophy to be present. So I
share it with him, but I have to make the qualification that I think
Heidegger has in a very deep way - though there are things that say the
opposite - said no not only to the details of Western Christianity but to
what seems to me always true of Christianity. And I don't want to say
yes to this.
One of the interesting things about Heidegger, and something
which I think is very central, is that all the previous great German phi-
losophers had been in their origins Protestants. Many of them later
forsook it, but they were in their origins Protestant. Heidegger is the
first very great German philosopher who was in his origins a Catholic.
He was going to be a Catholic priest, though he left it a very long time
ago. His origins are in Aristotle, and he is, it seems to me, the greatest
commentator on Aristotle who has ever lived. But my origins are not
philosophically in Aristotle, they're in Plato, and I want to be careful
that this separation between the eternal and time, which is so central
to Platonism, is maintained, and I'm not sure it is maintained in
Heidegger. That's why I'm being cautious.
Cayley: In what sense is this distinction not maintained in Heidegger?
Grant. Well, this is a queer language to use, but whatever Christianity
may be, it cannot get away from the crucifixion. Whatever Christianity
may be, one sees here the just man being most hideously put to death,
 Martin Heidegger 303

and this means to me that in Christianity there is always not only the
presence of God but also the absence of God. I would say that this is
central to Christianity, and that all the talk about what it is and what it
isn't has often been an argument between the presence and the
absence of God. Now, my question is how much the absence of God is
maintained in Heidegger, and how much the absence of God is main-
tained in polytheism. I want to be very careful because the very sub-
stance of what I have thought about anything would go if I couldn't
believe in the absence of God. And I'm not sure that this is maintained
in Heidegger. This takes us to Simone Weil, who understood the
absence of God with consummate genius.
It may be slightly opportunistic, but what I have learned from
Heidegger is the meaning of technology. Nobody has written about it
comparably or in such wonderful detail. Beyond that, I haven't really
gotten that far with Heidegger, but I am inclined to think that the
absence of God is not present. That's immediately talking in a contra-
diction, but emphasis on the absence of God seems to me to be neces-
sary for Christianity and for anything which attempts to be true.

Confronting Heidegger's Nietzsche (1988)

It may seem strange that I pay tribute to a friend (to whom my debt is
great) by making some comments about a commentary. But the very
nature of that debt is expressed in these comments, Professor Doull
has never reduced his study of the past to antiquarianism. Although a
remarkable and careful student of the past, he has always known that
philosophy is an activity practised now, and that its end is far higher
than that of scholarship. The present commentary being discussed
here is masterfully achieved at the level of scholarship, but is far more
than that. It is a philosopher confronting another philosopher and in
that confrontation bringing to explicitness what he considers to be the
great tasks of thought in the present.
One task of thought today is to try to understand the claims of the
moderns concerning the novelty of their experiments. To use Platonic
language, it is necessary to think about the novelness of those novel-
ties. A hundred years ago Nietzsche's writing made explicit (whatever
George Grant, 'Confronting Heidegger's Nietzsche,' intended for a collection of essays in
honour of James Doull. This is a preliminary draft, unfinished at the time of Grant's
death.
304 Thinking Their Thoughts

his extravagances) what is and must be assumed if one is within moder-

nity. He did this from his own 'withinness' and with epigrammatic con-
tempt for the deepest traditions of the West. Because of the extremity
and high style of his writing, the response to his understanding of
modernity has often been shallow, particularly among English-speak-
ing people. It has consisted either of patronizing Nietzsche's thought,
or of admiring simply its surface. Heidegger's gift to us in this com-
mentary is to unwrap it as both profound and careful. I know no other
writing about Nietzsche which is comparatively useful for the under-
standing of his thought, and so for the understanding of the modern
within its own consciousness of itself.
This is done not only at the level of the immediacies with which
technological society presents us. Heidegger places Nietzsche within
the history of Western thought. He places him within his own wonder-
ful account of how Western life has been determined by that history.
(To say 'wonderful' is not to say 'true.') Anyone who wishes to come
nearer to philosophy at this time, must look at this account of its his-
tory en pleine connaissance de cause. This account of the history turns on
Heidegger's confrontation (one might even say his sustained attack)
with Plato. Nowhere, not even within Nietzsche's writing, has there
been a more consummate account of the modern position that Plato
led Western thought into its basic misunderstandings. Within that con-
text these lectures may be taken as an important stage of Heidegger's
thinking. They were given between 1936 and 1940, and are clearly at
least Heidegger's second magnum opus — second that is to Sein und
Zeit* Derrida' seems to take them as the centre of Heidegger's
thought, and as the originator of deconstruction he is certainly a
remarkable student of Heidegger. It is proper to say here that my writ-
ing about this subject in this place is apposite, because the heart of my
debt to Professor Doull lies in the fact that he taught me how to read
the central books of the Republic.
It is important that this remarkable commentary be studied by
English-speaking people interested in philosophy. Many of us are not
capable of the German necessary for the original. After the war of
1939-45, the English retreated into a provincial account of philoso-
phy. As a young man I heard such leaders of the analytical school as

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927).

Jacques Derrida (1930-), French literary critic, creator of deconstructionism, influ-
enced by Heidegger.
 Martin Heidegger 305

AJ. Ayer and G. Ryle give a two-evening seminar on Heidegger's

thought, in which they mostly ridiculed it as consisting essentially of
obvious mistakes in the use of the verb 'to be.' The later English
school of the philosophy of language made central to their work the
writings of the Austrian Wittgenstein. But they used his work as com-
ing forth from someone who had taken upon himself the essence of
English secularism. At that time, of course, most English people
assumed they had won a victory in the war, and therefore saw no
need to study the thought of their defeated enemies. The popular
form of English progressivism had become the union of empiricism
in science with utilitarianism in public and private ethics. Such a
combination was deemed sufficient to come to terms with the
immense uncertainties which were consequent on the growing real-
ization of technological society. That is, they attempted to deal with
technological modernity without seeing any need to understand it.
They had no reason to study Nietzsche, who a hundred years ago
had thought that modernity from within itself. A fortiori they had no
reason to look at Heidegger's enucleation of that account, or his
emendation of it in the light of the events of the intervening
decades. The Americans, who in fact had won the war, were in the
happier position of having little philosophic tradition of their own,
other than in politics. Despite the usefulness of behaviourist models
for capitalist organization, there were still chinks in the monolith
through which alternative models of thought could arise. Into these
chinks filtered a greater interest in the history of philosophy than
was possible in England. This study was fostered particularly by Ger-
man Jewish scholars who had been driven from their country by
National Socialism.
It is by Americans that this excellent translation has been produced.
The German text was published in 1961. It was translated into French
in 1971. The final volume of this English translation was published in
1982. High praise must be paid to Professor David Krell, who edited
all the volumes with care and intelligence. He also translated the first
two volumes and participated in the translation of the third. He pro-
vides an 'analysis' at the end of each volume and a glossary of English
and German words. (I put the word 'analysis' in quotation marks
because I am not sure that this is the correct word for the useful

Sir A.}. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle were prominent Oxford philosophers of the analytical
school, who discounted the importance of metaphysics.
306 Thinking Their Thoughts

addenda.) But this is quibbling. All friends of philosophy must feel a

debt of gratitude to Professor Krell for his splendid planning and exe-
cution of this work.
... It is not primarily for the purpose of understanding Nietzsche
that I write about these books; nor simply for that of understanding
Heidegger; but because in these volumes Plato and Christianity are
shown as profoundly mistaken. My task is to justify Plato in the face of
what Heidegger says. This will necessarily entail understanding what
Heidegger is saying about the history of Western philosophy. For him,
Plato is the first metaphysician, Nietzsche the last. To elucidate
Nietzsche's thought Heidegger must say what metaphysics has been,
he must face its originator. Heidegger has written elsewhere about
Nietzsche, for example in What Is Called Thinking? He has also written
elsewhere about Plato, notably in Plato's Doctrine of Truth - a work con-
temporaneous with these lectures. But it is in these four volumes that
he 'confronts' both Nietzsche and Plato.
Heidegger has said that the only real criticism of another thinker is a
confrontation with that thinker. The German word he uses is ' aus-ein-
ander-setzung.' As a verb it is laus einander setzen.' It has often been trans-
lated as 'to explain.' Generally it is difficult to transcribe German
words properly into English ones of Latin root. Yet in this case the Ger-
man words can be almost literally transcribed as 'confrontation' and
'to confront.' To confront is to place oneself face to face with another.
In the sixteenth century the word was used to mean 'to present a bold
front.' As it is arrogance indeed to confront a genius such as Heideg-
ger, and an even greater arrogance to speak, as it were, for Plato, let
me say that I am indeed presenting a bold front to both Heidegger
and Plato. Megalomaniac or not, I do it out of my loyalty to Plato. Per-
haps even more it is done out of loyalty to Christianity. In these vol-
umes Heidegger only mentions Christianity occasionally and it is
always with the accents of contempt.
It hardly needs saying that this also makes my comment apposite in a
tribute to Professor Doull. He shares with me the refusal to exclude
Christianity from philosophy, or philosophy from Christianity. He has
never been one to think that philosophy is a pleasant extra for culti-
vated human beings, but rather something to illuminate our very exist-
ence in the here and now.
I am going to indicate briefly what will later need much careful
explication, and point to where in each volume the main confronta-
tions between Heidegger and Plato take place.
 Martin Heidegger 307

Volume I

The title of volume I, The Will to Power as Art, is the title of the fourth
chapter of the third book of Nietzsche's posthumous work. Before pro-
ceeding to the direct discussion of art, Heidegger states the basic
philosophical intention of his interpretation of Nietzsche.

The inquiry goes in the direction of asking what the being is. This tradi-
tional 'chief question' of Western philosophy we call the guiding ques-
tion. But it is only the penultimate question. The ultimate, i.e. the first
question is: what is Being itself? This question, the one which above all is
to be unfolded and grounded, we call the grounding question of philoso-
phy, because in it philosophy first inquires into the ground of beings as
ground, inquiring at the same time into its own ground and in that way
grounding itself. Before the question is posed explicitly, philosophy must,
if it wants to ground itself, get a firm foothold on the path of an episte-
mology or doctrine of consciousness; but in so doing it remains forever
on a path that leads only to the anteroom of philosophy, as it were, and
does not penetrate to the very centre of philosophy. The grounding ques-
tion remains as foreign to Nietzsche as it does to the history of thought
prior to him. (67)

As has been said many times, the central difficulty of translating

Heidegger into English, as compared for example with translating him
into French, is the form of the English infinitive. The structure of the
English infinitive, accompanied by any sense of English style, inhibits
the translation of the German 'das Seiri into 'the to be.' Neologisms
are not always unacceptable but this one surely is. I think the present
translation has used the happiest solution to this problem. It uses
'being' for all particular beings, and 'Being' for the German infinitive,
and the substantive derived from it. Nevertheless, in reading the work
one must always bear in mind the infinitive form of the verb when the
word 'Being' is used. Any forgetting will lead one away from the core
of Heidegger's thought.
As Heidegger is saying that the grounding question remains foreign
not only to Nietzsche but to all thought prior to Nietzsche, he obvi-
ously is including Plato. The extremity of Heidegger's claim about his
own thought in this passage must not turn our minds away from trying
to reach what Plato would have thought about such a claim.
As Heidegger turns to Nietzsche's account of art, an explication of
308 Thinking Their Thoughts

Plato's account becomes his means of bringing out the essence of

Nietzsche's position. He states why this is so in the following words:

According to Nietzsche's teaching concerning the artist, and seen in

terms of the one who creates, art has its actuality in the rapture of
embodying life. Artistic configuration and portrayal are grounded essen-
tially in the realm of the sensuous. Art is affirmation of the sensuous.
According to the doctrine of Platonism, however, the supersensuous is
affirmed as genuine being. Platonism, and Plato, would therefore logi-
cally have to condemn art, the affirmation of the sensuous, as a form of
non-being and as what ought not to be, as a form of . In Platonism,
for which truth is supersensuous, the relationship to art apparently
becomes one of exclusion, opposition, and antithesis; hence one of dis-
cordance. If, however, Nietzsche's philosophy is the reversal of Platonism,
and if the true is thereby affirmation of the sensuous, then truth is the
same as what art affirms, i.e., the sensuous. For inverted Platonism, the
relationship of truth and art can only be one of univocity and concord. If
in any case a discordance should exist in Plato (which is something we
must still ask about, since not every distancing can be conceived as discor-
dance), then it would have to disappear in the reversal of Platonism,
which is to say, in the cancellation of such philosophy.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche says that the relationship is a discordance,
indeed, one which arouses dread. He speaks of the discordance that
arouses dread, not in the period prior to his own overturning of Pla-
tonism, but precisely during the period in which the inversion is decided
for him. (162-3)

To compare the felicitous discordance between art and truth in

Plato with the raging discordance between the two in Nietzsche,
Heidegger first describes Plato's account of the matter, and then
shows how Nietzsche inverts the Platonic philosophy, and how from
that inversion the relation between art and truth is changed. To do
this Heidegger first comments on Plato's discussion of art as imitation
(mimesis) in the Republic, particularly the discussion of this in Book X.
He then discusses Phaedrus (248a-250a5) which passage is a height in
Socrates's speech on love in response to Phaedrus. Heidegger writes:
'Plato deals with the beautiful and with Eros primarily in the Sympo-
sium. The questions posed in the Republic and Symposium are conjoined

Mean (Greek), translated here as 'that which ought not to be.'

 Martin Heidegger 309

and brought to an original and basic position with a view to the funda-
mental questions of philosophy in the dialogue Phaedrus.' (167)
It hardly needs saying that the commentaries on these passages are
written from out of that closeness of attention which characterizes
Heidegger's writing about other philosophers. Yet it must also be said
that the exposition of what Plato is stating in these passages is inevitably
expressed by Heidegger from within (the very preposition seems pre-
sumptuous) what he thinks thinking to be. At this point it is hard to
clarify the implications of this sentence. Suffice it to say that on the one
hand I must avoid any implication that what Plato is saying can be laid
before others from out of some neutral stance of 'objectivity.' Nobody
is clearer than Heidegger that the account of one philosopher by
another cannot be simply a matter of 'objective' scholarship. Whatever
else may be true of philosophy, it transcends the stance of 'objectivity.'
On the other hand, to state this must not cloud the fact that what Plato
is saying in these passages is, in the very moment of its exposition by
Heidegger, placed within the Heideggerian universe of discourse. For
example, the Greek aktheia, which has been traditionally translated as
'truth,' is there used as that 'bringing out of concealment,' which is
Heidegger's translation of the word. Beyond such translations, these
commentaries assume throughout that Plato is philosophizing without
raising what is for Heidegger the ultimate question of philosophy:
'What is Being (to be)?'
This does not imply anything about Heidegger as trivial as that he begs
the question. Indeed, the fact that he so little begs any question is what
raises these accounts of Plato to the immediacy of confrontation. To put
it barely: the very clarity of Heidegger's incomparable thinkingof histor-
icism, from out of his assertion that human beings are only authentically
free when they recognize that they are thrown into a particular historical
existence, meets here the clarity of Plato's insistence that thought, at its
purest, can rise above the particularities of any historical context, that
indeed philosophy stands or falls by its ability to transcend the historical.
Describing this as the central theoretical division in all Western thought
is perhaps a mere expression of my struggling uncertainty as to who
misses what in this greatest of confrontations.

Volume II

Of the four volumes, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same is most con-
cerned with the direct exposition of Nietzsche's teaching. By calling it
310 Thinking Their Thoughts

'direct exposition' I mean to distinguish it from the illumination of

Nietzsche's teaching which places it within the history of philosophy.
There is in this volume a lucid account of Nietzsche's doctrine
through the course of his later writing, and a consummate exposition
of what it is to think this doctrine as true. Because this is the content,
Heidegger's confrontation with Plato is less immediate than in the
other volumes. Of course, Plato is present in the negative sense that
the very nature of the teaching precludes the possibility that Plato's
position on existential matters could be true.
Section 25, towards the end of this volume, is called The Essence of a
Fundamental Metaphysical Position: The Possibility of Such Positions in the
History of Western Philosophy. This is a propaedeutic to the last chapter
on Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position. The general section
(25) must be chosen out as one of the heights of Heidegger's writing
anywhere. As the thinker who announced 'the end of metaphysics,' he
here lays before us why metaphysics has been at the core of the great-
ness of Western human beings. Although not by name, Plato is present
throughout this chapter as the first metaphysician. Indeed, in any con-
frontation with Heidegger concerning his account of Plato, the ques-
tion of the possibility of metaphysics will be near the centre, and the
last chapters of this volume must be seen as preparatory to what will be
discussed in the next volume.

Volume III

It has been frequently said that in the lectures of 1939 and 1940, which
constituted volumes III and IV, Heidegger is turning away from
Nietzsche and is less concerned with laying him before us than in the
first two lecture courses. Be that as it may, the lecture course of Vol-
ume III, The Will to Power as Knowledge, is a wonderful exposition of
what is involved in Nietzsche's account of truth as a form of illusion. I
can only stand by my own experience, which is that these lectures have
made clear to me in a quite new way what it is to think of Nietzsche's
account of truth as a kind of error. Heidegger states as 'the all-decisive
question': 'What happens when the distinction between a true world
and an apparent world falls away? What becomes of the metaphysical
essence of truth?' (134).
The confrontation with Plato in this Volume III is only partially
explicit, but is of course always present. These lectures are in this sense
very close to Heidegger's work of 1947: Plato's Teaching Concerning Truth.
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 311

This account of what Heidegger meant by 'truth' may indeed

have come to him from Nietzsche (here the relations are very uncer-
tain.) However, in what he says in Volume III about truth he is led
beyond [?] Nietzsche. [The manuscript ends here.]

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-78)

Throughout the 1970s Grant had been satisfied that Nietzsche's account of mod-
ern consciousness, time as history, was the deepest. However, in the later 1970s
he began to study Rousseau's second discourse, On the Origins of Inequality
among Men, and concluded that Rousseau had influenced the formation of
the modern consciousness even more profoundly than Nietzsche. As always,
Grant's strategy was that of a negative theologian. He wanted first to expose the
true basis of modernity and then to show the inadequacy of that basis. This talk
was delivered to a meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in
Halifax at a session in honour of Jim Aitchison, a long-time Dalhousie political
scientist and New Democratic Party activist in Nova Scotia. Grant undoubtedly
considered a paper on Rousseau to be a fitting tribute to his social-democratic
friend.

... it is only this year that I discovered that Rousseau was a greater former of the
modern than even Nietzsche. The result is that at the moment I am writing a
long piece called 'History and Justice' which is an attempt to understand the
atheism of the left better than previously. Rousseau takes my breath away with
how clever he is in destroying the old tradition by saying that reason is acquired
by human beings in a way that can be explained without teleology. To try to
demolish Rousseau (and, therefore, marxism) seems to me essential these days
to free people from that which can hold them from ever thinking that Chris-
tianity might be true.
- George Grant to Joan O'Donovan, 1982

Why Read Rousseau? (1981)

... To start with a fact: English-speaking teachers of philosophy have

rarely paid serious attention to the two most comprehensive thinkers
of the anti-theological tradition - namely Rousseau and Nietzsche. (If I
312 Thinking Their Thoughts

were speaking simply politically I would have said atheist thinkers.)

This is an interesting fact about us. Of course, such neglect has
required justification. In this case the justification has been that nei-
ther Rousseau nor Nietzsche were philosophers in the serious sense of
that term. As English-speaking teachers of philosophy have generally
been secularized Protestants or Jews, lack of seriousness was therefore
considered a serious accusation. Indeed, both Rousseau and Nietzsche
had a high sense of the comic. Rousseau has been taken as an unsys-
tematic poet- a man of intense, if misguided insights, quite incapable
of the sustained and disciplined thought necessary to the true philoso-
pher. Such an account is found in many places from Bentham to Pop-
per. One can find it perhaps in its barest folly in Bertrand Russell's
History of Western Philosophy. One might have expected that Russell
would have turned his ire most vehemently against Christian philoso-
phers such as Augustine and Aquinas. But no: it is in the chapter about
Rousseau that his contempt and anger reaches its height. Rousseau
should not be called a philosopher; he is a self-indulgent poet. His
thought is filled with contradictions of such an obvious nature that
they could be discovered by any high school student of average ability.
His insights culminate politically in National Socialism, etc., etc. More-
over, in this long chapter, precis are given of Rousseau's chief writings.
In these precis I cannot recognize the originals.
Why have such interpretations of Rousseau been so consistently sus-
tained within our tradition? After all, modern English thought has also
been anti-theological in its intent. My purpose in this paper will be to
touch upon the causes of this lack of attention and to say why it has
had a bad effect on our self-understanding.
It will not be possible to substantiate the major premiss of my argu-
ment in the course of a short paper. To show that Rousseau is a com-
prehensive metaphysical philosopher of a very high order would
require a long book of commentary. That premiss will simply have to
be granted hypothetically if one is to follow what proceeds.
The causes of the lack of attention to Rousseau in the English-
speaking world are not difficult to determine. The long ascendency of
the English-speaking peoples - in the case of England from Waterloo
till about 1880, of the United States since 1914 - was achieved under
the rule of various species of bourgeois. (The word 'bourgeois' is itself
almost a Rousseauian invention.) Members of classes are liable to con-
sider their shared conceptions of political right to be self-evident,
when their rule is not seriously questioned at home, and when they
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 313

are successfully extending their empires around the world. Constitu-

tional liberalism went with technological progress and was justified by
various permutations and combinations of Lockeian contractualism
and utilitarianism. Older elements of our tradition from before the
age of progress, such as Protestantism, continued, but till lately in
weakened political influence. There were outbreaks of more modern
political thought, such as marxism in the United States of the 1930s
and 1960s. However, these were but bubbles on the surface of a Lock-
eian ocean. English-speaking writers on political philosophy have
largely been concerned with emendations of the Lockeian account.
That Locke should be taken as the master of this tradition is always
clarified for me in the fact that an atheist wrote a book entitled The
Reasonableness of Christianity.
Why, then, should we read Rousseau? By 'we' I mean people con-
cerned with political philosophy. If I were addressing modern politi-
cal theorists at this gathering, I would have written a different paper
and employed the style of Celine's three little dots. The reason we
should read Rousseau is the presence of the concept 'history' on the
English-speaking stage. I mean by the word 'history' that temporal
process in which beings are believed by some to have acquired their
abilities. Because of the ambiguity of the word in English, I must insist
that I am using it not to denote a form of study but a realm of being.
At this point German is clearer with its distinction between the words
'Historic' and 'Geschichte.' I use it here as the Germans use it in a
phrase such as 'Die Geschichte der Natur' - the history of nature. (In
so using it I neither assert nor deny that Geschichte is horse-
Geschichte.)
For English-speaking peoples, 'history' took its place upon the pub-
lic stage inescapably with Darwin. The historical sense was, of course,
present in English intellectual circles long before that. But with Dar-
win it became central for the English because it was at the heart of the
most important activity of the age — natural science. To use a too com-
mon German word, it entered our Weltanschauung. It is often said by
interpreters of Darwin that his essential discovery was not 'evolution'
but how evolution took place - namely by natural selection. After all
the word 'evolution' had been part of the intellectual baggage of
Europe since Diderot. This is true. But listen to Darwin himself, writ-
ing to Gray in 1863: 'Personally, of course, I care much about Natural
Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant, compared to the
question of Creation or Modification.' (Life and Letters, vol. II, 371.)
314 Thinking Their Thoughts

Obviously he is right, modification is the central issue. And obviously

also, modification in this sense is just a synonym for 'history.'
Once 'history' is part of our intellectual baggage, what happens to
the political science of Locke? Lockeian contractualism is ahistorical.
This difficulty of holding together history and ahistorical contractual-
ism is above all what has made English-speaking political philosophy
thinner and thinner to the point of the sheer formalism of the analyti-
cal tradition. On the other hand, the freedom of our thought from his-
toricism has in practical affairs helped to save us from some of the
crimes of communism and National Socialism. Nevertheless, my con-
cern here is not with the practical world but with the inanition that this
disregard of the idea of 'history' has caused in our thought. The
attempt to maintain contractualism freed from any ontological state-
ments simply fails because it requires that science be taken in phenom-
enalist and instrumentalist senses. It may be possible to attempt this
about the small results of academic technological scientists; it is quite
impossible to assume it about the results of a great synthetic scientist
such as Darwin. He knew that he was talking about what is. When one
is taught Darwinism at school one is not taught it alone as a useful
hypothetical tool, only of interest for those who are going to be special-
ists in the life sciences. The present controversy in the U.S., between
those who want Darwinism taught in the schools and those who want
creationism, cuts across all the clever talk by the analytical philoso-
phers. Both parties know that what is at issue is ontology. (Let me say
in parenthesis that I think the dominant academic community on this
continent has been unwise to patronize these people known as the
moral majority. My involvement with such people in common Chris-
tian tasks has taught me to the contrary.)
What is at issue here as far as political philosophers are concerned is
that you cannot hope to combine successfully an ahistorical political
philosophy with a natural science which is at its heart historical.
With the idea of history - call it if you will modification - we are ines-
capably led back to Rousseau. For it was Rousseau who first stated that
what we are is not given us by what in the ancient language was called
nature but is the result of what human beings were forced to do to
overcome chance or to change nature (in the modern sense of that
term.) Human beings have become what they are and are becoming
what they will be. We are the free, that is to say the undetermined ani-
mals, who can be understood by a science which is not ideological. We
can be understood 'historically.' It is well to bear in mind that late in
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 315

his life Rousseau said that the 2nd Discourse was his boldest writing. It
was in it that he risked most to say openly what he meant.
Why we must read Rousseau is that when we look at the sciences
today we see that they are everywhere historical. I have quoted before
the title of von Weizsacker's book Die Geschichte der Natur. And when
we seek the originating moment of that idea of history we come upon
Rousseau. Indeed, to use for a moment the modern way of talking
which distinguishes the words 'philosophy' and 'science,' it seems to
me that always when there is a great outpouring of scientific activity -
in my present example the nineteenth-century historicizing of nature
- there lies behind that activity some philosopher who in his thought
about the whole had made a breakthrough as against all previous
thought. When I say 'breakthrough' please do not think I am speaking
in terms of the progress of truth. To put it extremely simply, break-
throughs can be into error. To say whether Rousseau's idea of modifi-
cation was true or false is not a question I am qualified to answer. But
to bolster my amour propre: Who is? We must wait and perhaps see.
What I am able to say, however, is that Rousseau as the originator of
that idea of history is an example of another strange fact. Often the
originator of a great breakthrough in thought understands the
thought he is thinking in its implications more comprehensively than
those who follow him and live within that thought, modifying it and
clarifying it. In its primal moment - or, to quote Heidegger, in its com-
ing out into unconcealment - that thought appears in all its ambiguity.
What makes Rousseau such a master is that he ponders the implica-
tions of the idea of history with such care. If one reads, for example,
one of Rousseau's most influential epigones, Marx, one does not find
that battling with the contradictions raised by the idea of history that
one finds in Rousseau. It is indeed this balding with these contradic-
tions which has often led English-speaking commentators to take
Rousseau as a weak thinker whose inconsistencies can be pointed out
in some desultory tutorial at Oxford or Harvard. The contradictions
which professors of philosophy often find in Rousseau come forth
from his refusal to avoid the ambiguities which he finds in what he is
given to think.
To praise Rousseau is not to forget his critics; to remember his crit-
ics is to speak of Nietzsche. Nietzsche may have had greater targets

Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, The History of Nature., trans. F.D. Wieck (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press 1949, 1959).
316 Thinking Their Thoughts

such as Plato for his contempt-laden rhetoric, but in terms of his own
era it is Rousseau whom he singles out as most responsible for the dec-
adence of European thought. Rousseau is the thinker who attempted
to Christianize secularism. He is the epitome of that secularized Chris-
tianity which Nietzsche despises more than authentic Christianity
itself. Yet, and it is a great 'yet,' a 'yet' which shows one the very power
of Rousseau, Nietzsche accepts from Rousseau belief in the fact that we
are historical, that we acquire our abilities in the course of time in a
way that can be explained without teleology. Nietzsche indeed thinks
that he is the first human being who has understood 'the finality of
becoming' in a historical way. I am always loath to think that as a
teacher of philosophy I can in any way transcend my betters. Neverthe-
less, I often wonder whether it be the case that in his anger towards
Rousseau, Nietzsche fails to recognize how much of what he is think-
ing in the finality of becoming has already been thought by Rousseau.
After all, we have been taught in the greatest book of political philoso-
phy that anger is an emotion that corrupts the ability to be open to the
whole. Nietzsche's hatred of equality, democracy, socialism, etc., how-
ever brilliant, often seems to fall over into anger - indeed, perhaps
finally into madness. Did that anger obscure for him his debt to Rous-
seau? Perhaps somebody here with greater learning than myself knows
for certain whether Nietzsche had read the 2nd Discourse. We could,
of course, never know whether this is not the case. But it would be
interesting to know whether it is the case.
The understanding that human beings acquire their abilities
through the course of time expresses itself contemporaneously in that
doctrine we call 'historicism,' and historicism is the fate of all
branches of knowledge in our era. It is only necessary to remember
that the outstanding thinker of this era is an historicist from begin-
ning to end, however much some of his thought appears to be a quar-
rel with that fate. Indeed, Heidegger has expressed the consequences
of historicism for the history of thought with greater clarity and pro-
fundity than any other writer. The attempts to refute historicism from
within the tradition of English-speaking liberalism (for example, Sir
Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism) are well intentioned, but fee-
ble. Even Wittgenstein's effort in this direction is one of the most
inadequate moments in his thought. It is sufficient reason why we
should read Rousseau carefully that all efforts to know what it
behooves human beings to know are today touched with the deaden-
ing hand of historicism.
 Jeanjacques Rousseau 317

To end at the level of the particular: This charming scoundrel, this

enchanting paranoid, this man who often had no place to lay his head
and had to flee from country to country, yet at the same time was cos-
seted and beloved of the great ladies of the court, this man who
expounded the meaning of child-centred education and who left his
own five children at the foundling hospital, this man who was the great
teacher of the institutor of the Terror and the great teacher of the deli-
cious sweetness of dalliance, this great democrat who loved the salons
and boudoirs of the powerful, this man who wrote a very sane proposal
for the government of Poland and who believed the height of life was
to drift in a boat with his hand trailing in the water - it is a source of
high comedy that he was also a careful and comprehensive philoso-
pher. It certainly raises again the old question about which Plato and
Aristotle were in disagreement: What is the relation of the moral vir-
tues to the philosophic life? Even a Platonist such as myself who con-
siders that what we can know is closely tied to what we love, is moved by
the case of Rousseau to look again at the Aristotelian position. What-
ever the truth of this difficulty, it certainly appears to me that Rous-
seau's influence over Europe should make us hesitant in affirming the
scrutability of Providence. Perhaps it might lead us to apply analogi-
cally the attribute of comedian to Deity.
This page intentionally left blank
 Part 4
George Grant on ... .
Reviews and Essays
This page intentionally left blank
 FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

One of Grant's first publications after he accepted a teaching position at Dal-

housie University in 1947 was a review of an historical study of Francis
Bacon by Fulton Anderson, head of the philosophy department at the Univer-
sity of Toronto. Anderson was much annoyed by what he considered Grant's
impertinent review, and his anger increased with the publication of Grant's
'Philosophy' article, reprinted in Part 2 of this volume. The importance of the
short review of Anderson's piece on Bacon is that it shows that Grant's concern
about the threat of technological was present from the beginning of his life as
a philosopher. Indeed, it predated it, since the danger of technological civiliza-
tion had begun to present itself to Grant while he was serving as an air raid
precautions warden in London during the early stages of the Second World
War.

The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1948)

Today we are faced with the paradoxical situation where the mob
accepts as its priesthood those men we call scientists, when at the
same time this very priesthood leads the mob shouting to the cliff. It is
therefore extremely provoking to read a study of the thought of
Francis Bacon, who, as much as any other, stimulated men to that
study of nature, which on the one hand has given us ether and
penicillin, and on the other hand mass production and scientific
war. One may be allowed to say in the present journal, that it is
especially interesting to read such a study by a distinguished graduate
of Dalhousie.
Professor Anderson's study is not a popular essay for those who want
to garner a few vague generalizations about Bacon. It is a careful and
exact examination of all Bacon's writings. In the last chapter Prof.
Anderson describes Bacon's contribution to thought under three head-
ings which are worth quoting. '(1) freeing science from learning and

George Grant's review of F.H. Anderson's The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press 1949), Dalhousie Review, vol. 28 (1948-9). Used with permission.
322 Reviews and Essays

the privileges of the learned (2) separating completely truth which is

humanly discoverable from the dogmas of revealed theology and (3)
propounding a philosophy which is to be achieved by (a) a new sort of
scientific organon (b) a "modern" interpretation of nature and (c) the
identification of metaphysics with a generalized natural science based
on natural history.'
Where one may criticize Professor Anderson is in his failure to
judge the limitations of Bacon. The scholar is always called upon for
a judgment of worth and surely in the light of what we know today,
the enslavement of Bacon to the optimism of the scientific Renais-
sance is worth considering more deeply than Professor Anderson
attempts. For instance, under point (2) quoted above, what meaning
is there in Bacon's attempt to cut off truth humanly discoverable
from the revealed dogmas of religion? Its only implication is that the
truths of religion are not rational but arbitrary. Therefore, it leads to
an exaltation of the truths of natural science, and such an exaltation,
coupled with man's original sin, leads straight to the grinning mask
of scientific humanism at Hiroshima. An even greater criticism of
Bacon could be made at the ridiculousness of attempting an identifi-
cation of metaphysics with natural science, however generalized. This
book is a useful study of an earlier philosopher of natural science. It
could have been an important one if Professor Anderson had judged
how that philosophy had helped to bring us to the barrenness of
today.

BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872-1970)

Although Lord Russell was one of the leading philosophers of the early twentieth
century, especially celebrated for his contributions to mathematical theory, Grant
was not particularly interested in his thought. In this essay Grant uses Russell as
an eminent stalking-horse for a type of philosophy, common in Canada, which
Grant thought banal and confused. He also uses his attack on Russell to dis-
guise his assault on the Canadian philosophers, especially those in Ontario, who
had criticized his essay 'Philosophy' for the Massey royal commission. Russell
claimed that reason and philosophy could say nothing about questions of con-
duct yet wrote constantly about such questions.
 Bertrand Russell 323

Pursuit of an Illusion (1952)*

When Bertrand Russell has attempted to formulate the principles upon

which the study of mathematics rests or when he has analyzed the
nature of scientific propositions, he has made certain principles clearer
than they were previously. Such activities are part of the philosopher's
job and therefore it is possible to call Russell a philosopher. On the
other hand, when Russell turns from discussing man as scientist to man
as moral agent or as artist, he forgoes the philosopher's function. That
is, in writing about conduct or art he makes no attempt to discover the
principles underlying these activities. He freely admits this, of course,
and says that it is simply a necessity of the human condition. Over and
over again he repeats that reason has nothing positive to say about the
fundamental questions of conduct.1
Yet having said that reason cannot tell us anything fundamental
about conduct, Russell has spent most of his life writing at great length
on this very subject. Since 1914 more and more of his work has dealt
with such aspects of man's conduct as politics, education, religion, and
sex. Why has he done this?
This would seem less contradictory if Russell simply admitted that
what he has to say about human conduct is just his prejudices; admit-
ting, in other words, that he is making no attempt to show others what
are the principles of right conduct. But in his popular writings he never
makes clear this distinction necessary to his own scepticism. He never
states clearly when he is speaking as a philosopher and when he is gos-
siping about his own prejudices. From looking at Russell's writings, I
am led to the conclusion that at one and the same time he has desired
to assert moral scepticism (that is, the impotence of reason in the fun-
damentals of conduct) and has also desired to teach men about con-
duct, using his position of authority as a philosopher.
Of course, Russell cannot have it both ways. He cannot be sceptical
about the positive role of the philosopher in discovering ethical princi-
ples and also expect us to take with any seriousness his statements
about how we ought to live. His principle must apply to himself. If rea-
son is basically impotent in practical matters, then he either ought to

George Grant, 'Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell,' Dalhuusie.

Review (1952). Used with permission.
324 Reviews and Essays

be silent about these questions or else openly admit that what he writes
about them has no rational content. And, of course, if he admits the lat-
ter, then there is no reason why any man should take what he writes
about conduct seriously. We do not listen attentively when the brilliant
mathematician is talking baby talk to his children.
It is this contradiction that makes difficult any systematic analysis of
Russell's recent broadcast talks, Living in an Atomic Age. Does he claim
for them any of the persuasive power of reason, or are they just
intended as so much rhetoric that will stir us emotionally? As to Rus-
sell's intention, it is hard to answer this question one way or the other.
Indeed, the strange division in Russell's soul is particularly evident
throughout these talks. I would say he must be a man with the worldly
wit and cultivated style of the aristocrat, combined with a preacher's
hatred of man's sin and desire to improve men; but that these excellent
qualities were marred by continual contradictions and a failure to
reduce any question to principles. Indeed, I would say that the author
was a good man and a clever man, but not a philosopher. This is the
dilemma in which Russell is inevitably entangled by the contradiction
between the moral scepticism which he holds in principle and the
moral fervour which he adopts in practice. Because of his moral fer-
vour he wants to speak out and convince men to be good; because of
his moral scepticism he cannot speak in principles and therefore can-
not speak clearly.
Let me illustrate what I mean from Russell's writings on the problem
of conduct. First an example from these broadcasts. Russell is describ-
ing the present state of the world and discusses what should happen in
the future. One of his chief points is that modern industry is 'a kind of
rape,' and that men are using up the natural resources of our planet
frivolously. He condemns this state of affairs and demands that men
'should' think of posterity. Now, of course, I am not here arguing with
Russell as to the facts. I quite agree with him as to what men are doing
and that we should carefully husband our resources for the sake of
future generations. I am not arguing with him as an economist, but as
a philosopher. Within his own philosophical position, what does Rus-
sell mean by the word 'should?' The word 'should' presumably means
men ought to do this or that. It is one of the fundamental words that
Western men have used about their conduct. But if Russell is right and
reason cannot speak about the fundamentals of conduct, then he is
using the word 'should' with no rational significance. What, then, does
 Bertrand Russell 325

he mean when he says that men 'should' think about posterity?

From what Russell has written on this matter elsewhere, I would infer
either that he means that he likes men to take posterity into account, or
else that he commands them to do so. That is, he would say that funda-
mental ethical terminology such as 'should' is not meant rationally, but
either emotively (that is, imply like or dislike) or imperatively (that is,
as implying command). Accordingly, there is nothing rational in saying
that men should take thought of posterity. But again I ask, if these
words of Russell are, on his own showing, no more than expressions of
like and dislike or of command, why should anyone listen to them?
When Russell writes of mathematical principles we do not accept their
validity because he likes these principles rather than others, or because
he commands us to them, but because he has convinced our reason. If
in writing of conduct he can show us no reason for acting one way
rather than another, why should we agree? And what is more impor-
tant, how can he convince anybody who disagrees with him? There are
obviously men in the world who do not care to take thought for poster-
ity. Russell can present them with no reason for caring. He simply holds
up his passion for posterity against other men's passion for immediate
satisfaction.
I wish I could be sure that Russell always makes clear that he does not
use such words as 'should' or 'ought' with rational content. Certainly in
his writings for philosophers he has made his scepticism clear. He had
done his utmost to be consistent. But the same cannot be said for these
broadcasts. He uses, for instance, such sentences as the following: T
have been concerned in these lectures to set forth certain facts, and
certain hopes which these facts render rational.' The phrase 'rational
hopes' is plainly inconsistent with an assertion about the impotence of
reason in ethics. For admitting the facts as he sees them (e.g., the rape
of our natural resources), there is still no reason on his view of conduct
why anything follows rationally as a hope about man's behaviour either
as it should be or as it may be predicted. Why, then, does he use such
phrases as 'rational hopes'?
Russell implies one set of principles for philosophers and a quite
contradictory set for the public. And he cannot here use the doc-
trine of economy as an excuse. For the man who applies this doctrine
may rightly avoid the subtlety of principle in popular lectures, but he
certainly cannot enunciate principles in his profound and popular
writings.
326 Reviews and Essays

There seem to me two possible explanations as to why Russell falls

into this contradiction. Perhaps he doesn't recognize he is falling into
it. If this is so then we may have less respect for him as a philosopher,
for it is the job of philosophers to ferret out contradictions. The other
possible explanation is that he wishes to convince his popular audience
that what he is saying about conduct has rational content, so that they
will accept his opinions. That is, he wishes to convince his audience of
the truth of a principle which he himself rejects as false. The idea that
reason does play a central role is so deeply embedded in the tradition
of the West that Russell perhaps thinks it is useful to foster the illusion
for his own purposes. But surely, if there is anything that all philoso-
phers may agree on, it is that fostering illusions for whatever purpose is
not their function. Russell should have made clear in his writings that
his repeated use of the word 'should' has no rational content. I, on the
other hand, am quite ready to use the word 'should' about Russell, for
as I will attempt to show later it is a word that has in truth the deepest
rational content.
Another illustration from Russell's popular writings: in a recent
article on Gladstone and Lenin, he discusses the eminent men he has
known. He ends the article with the statement that 'what I have found
most unforgettable is a certain kind of moral quality, a quality of self-
forgetfulness, whether in private life, in public affairs, or in the pursuit
of truth.' He takes as an example of this quality E.D. Morel, the man
who was chiefly responsible for exposing the abuses of the Belgian gov-
ernment in the Congo, and who later was a pacifist in the war of 1914.
Of course I agree with Russell about the glory of the qualities he men-
tions. The self-forgetting man is surely the highest vision of God vouch-
safed to us in this world. 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and
of angels.' E.D. Morel is equally one of my heroes. But I take issue with
Russell again at this point because his moral scepticism prevents him
from saying clearly why Morel was such a high type of human being and
therefore presumably the kind of man we should all attempt to
become. Russell can say nothing to those who would reply that Morel
was a bad type of man. And the last years leave us with no doubt that
there are men all over the world who would consider Morel misguided
or wicked. Any consistent totalitarian would say that Morel was vicious
because he considered there were principles demanding his loyalty
more than the principle of loyalty to the state. The hedonist would say
that Morel was misguided because he exalted self-forgetfulness above
his personal pleasure. Certain modern psychologists might say that
 Bertrand Russell 327

Morel's hungering and thirsting after righteousness was a sign of

'moral diabetes.' And because of Russell's scepticism, he can present
no principles which will be valid against the totalitarian and which will
show him why loyalty to the state cannot be a first principle of conduct.
And, of course, the inference must be that if reason has nothing to say
against the totalitarian, the non-totalitarian is as much confined by the
prejudice and force and tradition. For either reason can speak about
conduct, or else prejudice, force, and tradition are the deciding
factors.
In fact, Russell, having been brought up in a certain section of nine-
teenth-century English society, happens to like the tradition of charity
inherited from the broad line of Christian principles, the tradition of
private judgment inherited from Puritanism, and the traditions of
humane conduct that comes to the west from the Greeks. As he likes
these, he admires Morel who partook of all of them so beautifully. But
Russell's defence of these qualities can only lie in a completely irratio-
nal acceptance of one tradition as against another.
Russell, who has spent so much of his life making fun of tradition,
finally must rest his case as to the central issue of human life - standards
for action - on a traditionalism which reason is completely impotent to
criticize or improve. The churches he so castigated for irrationalism
and traditionalism were never so irrationalist or traditionalist as that.
No Protestant or Catholic would go so far as Russell.

II

The question, then, which Russell's philosophy raises is whether reason

can be practical. I believe this is the most important issue of all philos-
ophy, for if we say with Russell that our action cannot be finally regu-
lated by principles, we are saying that in the most important aspect of
our nature reason is impotent.
In discussing this issue, it is first necessary to state Russell's position
more fully. As I understand Russell, the place of reason in our life is to
help us to find the means to achieve what our passions lead us to desire.
Means belong to reason; ends to passion. If we desire riches more than
anything else, the place of reason is to show us how to get rich. If our
chief end is the conquest of women, reason will help us to become
expert seducers. Reason can also show us the probable consequences
of pursuing one course of action as against another. What reason can-
not do is tell us whether those consequences are good or bad. It cannot
328 Reviews and Essays

tell us what is the proper end of all conduct. We must rely on our emo-
tions for that central direction. According to Russell, the role of reason
is confined to logical and empirical concepts, and does not extend to
the regulation of our wills by principles.
In criticizing this view, up to this point, I have simply tried to make
clear some of its consequences. The consequences for society are
clearly that, when disagreement arises over ultimate principles of con-
duct, the issue must be decided by force or passion. If one American
likes to lynch Negroes and another American says it is wrong, the issue
can only finally be decided by force. The American who hates lynching
can indeed say with reason that such and such are certain conse-
quences of lynch law. If, however, the other American is ready to accept
these consequences and still likes lynching, there is nothing further
that reason can say. In personal life there is no point in using our intel-
ligence to judge what persons we should accept as examples. There is
no meaning in saying that Copernicus or Socrates or Milton chose wor-
thier ends than Himmler or Napoleon or Mickey Spillane.'
Any argument from consequences is, of course, only of limited value.
It must be supplemented by some positive grounds for thinking other-
wise. Clarity about consequences is, however, necessary, for down the
ages it has led men desperately to inquire whether there is not some
intellectually respectable position other than moral emotionalism. In
the Platonic dialogues, Socrates returns again and again to the conse-
quences of scepticism, so that he can persuade the young men to see
how in fact reason does operate in their lives.
It is necessary now to turn to the positive reasons why philosophers
have believed that our practical life can be regulated by reason. In stat-
ing these grounds I would point out to those readers who are not phi-
losophers by profession (it will be obvious to those who are) that
nothing I say has any originality. It has all been said, once and for all, in
that most brilliant of philosophic works, Plato's Republic. In modern
philosophy much the same argument has been put by Kant. Also, it will
be clear that what I say on this matter is not meant as a complete state-
ment of the case for ethical rationalism. That could only be done in
greater compass than this article allows. It is simply an outline of the
rationalist position, given to make clearer the difference between it and
Russell's irrationalism. Anyone who wants a systematic account of ethi-

Heinrich Himmler (1900-45), German Nazi leader, head of the SS.

Mickey Spillane (1918— ), American detective writer, creator of Mike Hammer.
 Bertrand Russell 329

cal rationalism can of course find it in Plato's Republic, Kant's Critique of

Practical Reason, or the nineteenth book of Augustine's City of God.
Men act in the world to achieve purposes. We are moved to action by
desire. We act because we think it will be good to achieve this or that
object of our desire. The question, then, at issue is the relationship of
desire to reason in our consciousness. To repeat, Russell's position is
that reason helps us to find means to achieve what our passions lead us
to desire. The position I maintain is that reason and desire are far more
intimately bound in consciousness. The vast range of our particular
desires does not appear simply as a chaos, because reason presents us
with the idea of universality as an end, in which that very unity which we
call the self, and not mere separate desires, will be satisfied. It is this
idea of the highest good which allows the struggle between unity and
diversity in our selves to seek reconciliation. Because of it all particular
desires do not appear to us completely uncoordinated, but can be
brought into some intelligible hierarchy, under the regulation of this
principle of spirit. The union of reason and desire is even more inti-
mate than this, because not only does reason give us this idea of a high-
est good, it also desires to realize itself therein. This is what is meant
when we say our wills are rational. We are moved by the desire for ratio-
nality itself. I would say that we see this not only in personal conduct,
but also in the striving of the scientist for universality, in the desire of
the lawyer for a just law.
To put the same point in slightly different language, I would say that
this is what we mean when we use words such as 'should' or 'ought' or
'duty.' When we say that it is the duty of man to do this or that we
mean that he should follow a course of conduct not motivated by the
particularities of his pleasure at any given moment, but by some princi-
ple that is universal and therefore is law for him, irrespective of the
passing whims of his consciousness. What seems to us the conflict
between duty and desire is just the conflict between the desire for the
highest good and the desire for some less whole good which arises
from the particularity of our natures. To use Russell's example of E.D.
Morel, how did Morel transcend the particularities of his passing
desires to hold to with sufficiently abiding desire the interests of the
Africans in the Congo, unless his reason gave him this idea of a univer-
sal good, which by his formulation of it called him to the service of
their proper interests? When Russell says that we 'should' take thought
of posterity rather than our immediate greeds, surely such ethical fore-
sight is only possible if reason does give us an idea of a highest good in
330 Reviews and Essays

the knowledge of which we can transcend the pressing particularity of

our desires?
There are, however, two points I wish to make, because they always
seem to arise in a discussion of the practical reason. The first concerns
the appeal to the so-called facts of life. Is it not a fact, so this appeal
runs, that men's conduct is dominated by force and passion? Is it not
simply romantic to say that men act from principles? Just go into a big
city during a heat wave and you will see that men are not ruled by rea-
son. Just look at the African natives, the waitresses, the stockbrokers.
Of course, the primary answer to this so-called appeal to experience is
to make clear that the idea of a practical reason does not affirm what
men accomplish in this world, but rather what they should accomplish.
It is a matter of definition and therefore cannot be settled by the
appeal to any particular experience. I am, however, quite willing to go
farther and meet this appeal to experience by a contrary one. I have
never met a human being who does not hold some conception of the
highest good, however imperfectly formulated and imperfectly fol-
lowed. That is, I have never met a human being who was not capable of
giving some faint semblance of order to his desires.
To go even further, to deny that reason operates in the conduct of all
men is to deny that most men have any chance of leading the rational
life. For most men in this world have not the opportunity to develop
their reasons in the practice of some art or science. The means for
rationality is given to most persons only through their conduct. The
slum mother has no chance for the life of science or art, but only
achieves rationality by exalting her family's general good above her
own. To deny that reason operates in action is, then, to deny that most
people even enter into the glory of existence which is rationality. To
appeal again to consequences, can we dare to be so presumptuous
about other men?
To the contrary, I would say that it is the chief wonder of human life
that at the profoundest level all men are equal. All men are given in
conduct this idea of spirit, which, however imperfectly framed because
of historical circumstances, is at least sufficiently clear for them to
choose whether their wills be ruled by it or not. At the same time, no
man is given this idea with such perfect clarity as would eliminate for
him the possibility of choice. Only on such a conception of reason as I
have outlined can equality, and therefore democracy, rest. To trans-
pose into a different language, the conception of reason presenting to
all men the idea of a highest good is just the Christian belief of the
 Bertrand Russell 331

image of God in all men. The denial of this by Russell and others is the
denial of the only possible theoretical grounds for democracy.
The second point I wish to make is that the formulation of the prin-
ciples of morality is in some ways similar and in some ways different
from the formulation of the principles of logic. It is necessary to make
this point, because sceptics such as Russell always emphasize the
greater public agreement about logical principles, and infer therefore
the invalidity of moral principle. Looking both at the differences
among logicians and at the broad acceptance of the idea of the highest
good in Western philosophy, I am not impressed by any idea of total
divergence. Nevertheless, it is true that the formulation of moral prin-
ciples is more difficult than is those of logic. It is therefore necessary to
discuss in what ways I consider them similar and in what ways different.
They are similar in the following sense. We can think scientifically
before we have formulated the principles of scientific thought; we can
act morally before we have formulated moral principles. Yet, in both
cases, the highest principle of the theoretical reason and the highest
principle of practical reason, when they are formulated, are seen to be
necessary to the proper functioning of thought and of conduct. So the
idea of the highest good is a necessary idea. Yet, having stated that
firmly, I would also state that their formulation varies in difficulty. In
the formulation of the principles of conduct our wills and our desires
are more deeply involved than in the formulation of theoretic princi-
ples. When we formulate mathematical principles we can use those
principles in physiology or physics (in one part of our lives), while we
do not use them in our relations with our wives or neighbours or the
world in general. Having formulated, on the other hand, the princi-
ples of the practical reason, we are committed to a total way of life. We
are committed to the effort to apply those principles universally. So, in
the practical reason, what we have to surrender for the sake of clarity is
the whole body of our habits. The commitment is not partial but com-
plete. It is, therefore, only by the profoundest effort of our wills, the
greatest discipline of our habits, that we can sufficiently face the prob-
lem to come to the recognition of the highest good. It is just the
understanding of this difficulty that led philosophers such as Plato and
Augustine humbly to insist that their ability to isolate the principles of
conduct was not finally due to their own efforts, but was a gift, or in
other words, grace.
If seeking the psychological and historical causes of other men's lives
were not generally just mud-slinging masquerading as science, I might
332 Reviews and Essays

be tempted to speculate why the principles of the practical reason have

been unclear to Russell.

///

The following are two passages from Russell's writing. The first is from
an essay he wrote in 1902 called A Free Man's Worship. The basic argu-
ment is summed up in the final passage. I quote:

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure
doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruc-
tion, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned
to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of
darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty
thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors to the
slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built;
undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the
wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresist-
ible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemna-
tion, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own
ideas have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

The second passage is the final words of Living in an Atomic Age, spo-
ken in 1951:

Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart to joy,
and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgotten
past. He must lift up his eyes and say: 'No, I am not a miserable sinner; I
am a being who, by a long and arduous road has discovered how to make
intelligence master natural objects, how to live in freedom and joy, at
peace with myself, and, therefore, with all mankind.' This will happen if
men will choose joy rather than sorrow. If not, eternal death will bury
Man in deserved oblivion.

I have not quoted these two passages because there may seem on the
surface a contradiction between Russell's appeal to doom and to joy.
In my opinion, when one threads one's way through the rhetoric one
finds much that is true and much that is false in both passages. Even if
upon analysis these passages could in no way be reconciled, a man has
a right to change his mind at least every fifty years. I quote them rather
 Bertrand Russell 333

because they are both about the fundamentals of human existence -

what is man's final destiny, what are the motives which any knowledge
about it should inspire in our conduct? I quote them because in nei-
ther case does Russell make any attempt to appeal to reason, but sim-
ply lays down propositions as dogmatically given. And in no place in
his vast writings have I been able to find any attempt to argue this basic
problem.
Even if the existentialists are right when they assert that the issue
between doom and joy can only be settled irrationally (and here my
rationalism would of course disagree with them), still it is the philoso-
pher's job to show clearly how that decision between joy and doom
should consistently affect our conduct. Russell never attempts this con-
sistency. Indeed, in A Free Man's Worship he asserts the strange position
that we must pursue the rational life, even though final reality is blind
chance or matter. Fifty years later he is less paradoxical, but more dog-
matic. He asserts the need for men to be joyful without giving any rea-
sons why they should be. This appeal to contradiction, dogma, and
rhetoric to settle the fundamental issue of life is a final illustration of
how large is the irrationalism.
Naturally, I have not written the foregoing to convince Russell. He
has presumably read Plato and Kant (though his History of Western Phi-
losophy might leave one in some doubt as to this). I have written it rather
because I so often hear Russell talked about as a great advocate of
human reason as against the obscurantism and mysticism of the older
philosophy and theology. The fact remains, however, that at the centre
of the old philosophy and theology there lies the proposition that man
is a rational animal. This proposition meant that man can only achieve
his proper end by the perfection of his reason. At the heart of Russell's
thought lies the denial of this. My argument is not with those people
who admire Russell and recognize this central irrationalism. It is with
those who admire Russell and think in so doing they are affirming the
rationality of man.
This is, indeed, the contradiction that lies at the heart of much of
the modern thought that took its impetus from our scientific achieve-
ments. Men such as Freud and Marx, starting from the claim that
human reason can establish truth, end up with the conclusion that
man's nature is ultimately irrational. This is, of course, patently obvi-
ous in crude and hesitant thinkers such as Marx and Freud. It is less
obvious but equally true of subtler men such as John Dewey and Ber-
trand Russell.
334 Reviews and Essays

What final value is there in any clarity about logical principles or any
appreciation of wit (both debts we owe to Russell), if men are per-
suaded by his philosophy that they are not rational animals, but clever
beasts with a facility for mathematics? For though men are not simply
clever beasts, the fact is that when they are persuaded over a length of
time that they are such, they more and more act as if they were. Surely
the last years are an illustration that the ground of civilized life is the
assertion of our essential rationality.
Of course, to a philosopher the denial that man's rationality is his
essence is particularly distressing, for it denies the use or indeed the
possibility of his study. Philosophy means simply the love of wisdom,
and wisdom means knowledge of the true end of life. If men are not
rational they cannot reach such knowledge and therefore the attempt
is the pursuit of an illusion. This is why Russell is such a confused
thinker. Calling himself a philosopher, he has tried to convince men
that philosophy is a waste of time.

NOTE

1 If anyone doubts that I have stated Russell's position correctly, I would refer
him to The Philosophy ofBertrand Russell— in the Library of Living Philoso-
phers - vol. 5, 531-5, 720-7. There he will find a plethora of quotations from
Russell on this subject.

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the leading intel-
lectual figures of the twentieth century, and his influence was ubiquitous espe-
cially in North America after the Second World War. Before Freud there had been
few treatments available for mental illness and little understanding of its ori-
gins. Although many of Freud's theories have been discredited, for a while in the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s they appeared to offer a theoretical basis upon which to
develop cures for individuals and to forge a better society. Freud's ideas, such as
his theory of the Oedipus complex, passed into general intellectual currency, and
Grant had lingering suspicions that perhaps they explained somehow his close
relationship to his own mother. However, he completely rejected Freudian-based
 Sigmund Freud 335

theories of social change as the zvay in which social-work professionals should

approach their clients.

You would leaf over the articles, the technical psychiatric details, muttering
'God-God,' then shaking yourself, having worked yourself up into a state, your
hair by this time falling again over your forehead, your eyes gleaming, you
would rise from the couch, swaying, braced and clenched, throwing the book
down, throwing one trench-clad arm out saying 'What they need is Love!'
-Alice Boissonneau, 'In My Room,' unpublished, c. 1945.

Conceptions of Health (1962)

... To start from a traditional platitude: Health and disease are gener-
ally described in relation to each other, and therapy is defined with
emphasis on one or the other. Thus, in the Oxford Dictionary one
finds under 'therapy' phrases such as 'the art of healing' and 'the cura-
tive treatment of disease.' The verbs 'to heal' and 'to cure' are both
defined as 'to restore to health.' To restore is to give back, and so cur-
ing implies the loss of something that is normally present and that now
through therapy is given back. We are inclined, however, to look at the
matter the other way around when we are being practical. We think of
our breathing only when it is obstructed. Health is thought of as the
absence of disease. Indeed, in the disease-therapy-health progression,
therapy inevitably looks both ways, and in the various moments of its
activity fastens its gaze now this way, now that. This is true of all the
influential systems of therapy, both in the past and in the present. From
the Western tradition I single out the two most influential - the Pla-
tonic progression, 'ignorance-conversion to dialectic-illumination,'
and the Christian progression of 'sin-repentance through grace-salva-
tion.' These two have often been united; they have often been thought
of as one. Without discussing this subtle matter, I will for the present
purposes distinguish them. From the modern world I single out the
medical pattern, 'neurosis-psychotherapy-normality.'
In these systems, therapy has its positive and its negative moments.
The philosopher must be continually aware of his ignorance if he
would persevere in the pursuit of wisdom. If the Christian is to be in

George Grant, 'Conceptions of Health,' in Psychiatry and Responsibility, Helmut Schoeck

and fames W. Wiggins, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand 1962), 117-34.
336 Reviews and Essays

true repentance before the Cross, he must face some of his past acts as
sins. The patient must admit the unconscious source of some of his acts
if the analysis is to be a success. On the other hand, philosophy will be
frustrated by misologism if its dialectical struggles are not known as
leading to the Good. The Christian's repentance will leave him a Stoic
or a Pharisee if it is not seen as preparation for the divine love. The
modern patient must give some meaning to the idea of normality.
Indeed, one aspect of the art of the therapist is to find a rhythm
between these positive and negative moments suitable to the individual
case.
As modern psychotherapists have made their art central to North
American society and established an institutional framework appropri-
ate to their social power, two phenomena about their theory and prac-
tice become increasingly evident - the certainty of their conceptions of
disease, the vagueness of their conceptions of health. To account for
this would require a book of social history and is not my purpose here.
Some generalizations about it can, however, be made.
1.) In the work of the master himself, therapeutic pessimism is con-
tinually present. This seems to me to arise above all from Freud's
ambiguous relationship to modern science and the modern assump-
tions about man and civilization which are the framework of that sci-
ence. He writes of himself as one of the dedicated priesthood of science
who have put aside the ancient religious and metaphysical superstitions
and who can, therefore, distinguish provable knowledge from mythol-
ogy. Basic to this positivism is the identification of knowledge with
human power to change the world. At the same time, one result of his
science was an account of the structure of the mind in which reason is
viewed both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, as arising from the
suppression of the instinctual in man. That suppression of the instinc-
tual is seen as the very cause of personal and social disease. The gaining
of power over nature, central to modern science, is the very cause of
disease when applied by man to himself.
This ambiguous relation toward science is illustrated in the very his-
tory of Freud's work and in his account of that work. In his writings
before 1919, he is firm in stating the methodological principle that his
conceptions are not final, but are hypotheses to be changed readily in
the light of observation and practice. Yet even these earlier techniques
and conceptions are themselves based on something extrascientific -
his own self-analysis of the 1890s. To see that this self-analysis is extrasci-
entific in psychoanalytical terms, it is only necessary to state that since
 Sigmund Freud 337

Freud's day all professional analysts must themselves be analyzed by

somebody else. The very term 'self-analysis' is one of ridicule to the
orthodox. Yet for psychoanalysis to come to be, there had to be an orig-
inal self-analysis. It is for this reason that Freud's most loyal disciples,
while praising him as the great scientist of the psyche, still write of this
self-analysis in language that believers would use about the redemption
of the world by the passion of Jesus Christ. According to Edward
Glover, there have been two moments in history of crucial significance
- the first repression buried deep in primitive times and Freud's recog-
nition of the causes of repression in his self-analysis. That language of
uniqueness and victory is best found in Ernest Jones's life of Freud' on
the first page of the chapter on the self-analysis. 'Once done, it is done
forever,' writes Jones as a latter-day St Paul. This is not said to cast ridi-
cule on this great act of Freud by comparing it with the act of acts, but
simply to point out that the basis of modern psychotherapy is not a sci-
entific discovery in the proper sense and that there is an ambiguity in
the Freudians resulting from their insistence both that they are scien-
tists and yet that they must pay homage to this act.
Indeed, in Freud's later writings (Civilization and Its Discontents most
particularly), he passes completely beyond the scientific into the meta-
physical. Eros and Thanatos,+ which are the final rulers of human
existence, are not written about as scientific hypotheses, but as postu-
lated realities from which he deduces a metaphysic of history in terms
of which his therapeutic and social pessimism, implicit in his earlier
practical works, is lifted to a new level of intelligibility. Civilization is a
product of the ego and the superego, which arose as the individual
was forced to come to terms with 'reality' - that is, to live by the reality
principle rather than by the pleasure principle. Freud works out this
tragic history, not only in terms of the life of the individual, but of the
race as a whole. Sexuality is the basic manifestation of the life instinct,
Eros. Civilization is produced by sublimated Eros. But sublimated Eros
is desexualized Eros. Thus, though civilization is built by Eros, con-
stant desexualization is necessary as civilization broadens its sway.
Hence, Eros is weakened, and the death instinct is released, with all its
potentialities for destruction. In fact, civilization moves to its destruc-
Edward Glover, Techniques of Psychoanalysis (New York: International Universities Press
1958).
Ernest Jones (1879-1956) Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth Press
1956-8).
Love and death (Greek).
338 Reviews and Essays

tion as it moves to its fulfilment. Here is no optimistic 'gnosticism' of

progress, but a statement of certain necessary limits to human exist-
ence. The earlier insistence by Freud that psychoanalysis is part of the
liberating tradition of modern science here openly meets the fact that
Western civilization's modern mark has been science, that the mark of
that science has been the pursuit of power, and that, therefore, mod-
ern science is a result of the successful repression that Western man
has imposed on the free play of his instincts, and this in turn causes
the releasing of the death instinct.
Freud's therapeutic pessimism is thus understandable, and it is no
wonder that health for man is a very limited state. Therapy does not
result in a return of the repressed instincts to full play, but to a sublima-
tion through recognition of what has been repressed - a sublimation
which holds in check the death instinct, but which has inevitable stoical
undertones. It is not too much to say that health becomes for Freud the
making the best of a bad job. His metaphysical and tragic sense of life
leads him to assumptions about human existence very different from
the optimism so characteristic of the science of his day. Such a position
could not include any clear or positive account of what constitutes
health for human beings.
2.) As the psycho therapeutic movement changed from its origins as a
minority of secularized Jews living in the alien atmosphere of the Haps-
burg Empire to the wielders of social power that they are now in North
America, it is not surprising that their conceptions of health should
have been modified. Their enormously rapid rise to a position of ascen-
dance was partly made possible by the fact that they remained within
the medical profession. In early-twentieth-century America the medical
profession had unequalled prestige because it combined the power of
modern science with the practical 'do-goodery' of liberal Protestant-
ism. And the medical profession itself- particularly its more advanced
members, who were held by the religion of science - had a clear inter-
est in accepting psychotherapy. The very arrogance of the modern
medical profession saw in the new successes of psychotherapy -
assumedly carried out entirely within naturalist assumptions - the
chance for themselves to be the arbiters not only of the body but of the
mind. American scientists and doctors were much more practical and
immediate than the Europeans from whom psychoanalysis had sprung.
Freud may have thought that he had freed his mind from finalist con-
ceptions in the name of positivism, but this for him was mere theory
compared to the unphilosophical practicality which was the very fabric
 Sigmund Freud 339

of the American Protestant scientist. In accepting psychotherapy,

therefore, American medicine was not only influenced by it, but also
put its arrogant practical stamp upon it.
Further, as psychotherapy took over the leadership in providing
mental health in a mass society, it was inevitably caught even deeper in
the dilemmas of responsible success. So psychotherapy was influenced
not only by American medicine but by the whole fabric of American
culture. Professions do not gain power in any society unless in large
measure they do what powerful influences in that society want. Psycho-
therapists adjusted themselves to the needs, desires, and interests of the
industrialized, democratic, capitalist society. Finally, as responsibility
for the mass society grows, the very immediacies of practicality push the
profession farther and farther away from clarity about its ends. When a
physician attends a child with earache, obviously something needs to be
done. When the child is better, the doctor has a waiting room full of
patients and has little time to define health other than to say that the
child can now do what children generally do in our society. Most par-
ents and doctors will settle for such a pragmatic account of health. So
equally the office of the psychotherapist is crowded, and beyond is the
spectre of the mental hospitals. The patient may still be neurotic, but
she can now function as a wife and mother and need not come to the
office or, worse, go on to the mental hospital.
In this paper I am criticizing the emptiness of modern psychotherapy
in terms of ultimate truth. But let me state unequivocally that 'getting
on with the job' is a necessary moral maxim for all men. What the world
tends toward without it is seen in quietist societies, and against this we
may thank God for our activist tradition. Any theorist who neglects the
circumstances that make the maxim necessary neglects an essential
aspect of truth in the name of theoretical pride. This is so even in
North America, where the maxim is so often an excuse for idolatry. At
the same time, however, it is permissible for the theorist to point out
the ambiguity in men who arrogate to themselves more and more social
power and then justify their confusion by how much work they have to
do. The absence of any definition of health in modern psychotherapy is
certainly in part a function of this latter process.

In contrast to the growing vagueness about health among psycho-

therapists, there is one group of Freudians who give a definite and pos-
340 Reviews and Essays

itive content to their concept of health and justify that account within a
philosophy of nature and history. They are those who have attempted
to unite the thought of Freud and Marx. For the rest of this paper I
intend to describe and comment on these thinkers. I do so because in
them the assumptions of modern humanism about man and society are
enunciated in a most explicit way and also because in them much that
is unsystematically assumed in official therapy is openly asserted.
To put the matter historically: Since 1914 it has surely become obvi-
ous that the truth of the assumptions of modernity cannot be taken
with quite the uncritical certitude that they were previously. (I use 'the
assumptions of modernity' in the broad sense to distinguish them
from those of the antique world and from those of Christianity.) Yet
modern psychotherapy is essentially a product of that modernity. And
in these thinkers this modernity is given its widest scope. Therefore, in
them the assumptions of modern psychotherapy are most openly
explicit. I am also quite confident that the view of existence of these
thinkers is becoming and will become increasingly a popular faith in
our society.

The concept of health in these thinkers is reached by combining the

progressivist view of history (as found in its most sophisticated exposi-
tor, Marx) with Freud's assumption that the alienation of man from his
job is caused by the alienation of man from his instincts. In describing
that position, I take the marxist account of history as given. These men
believe, however, that Freud's recognition of the alienation of man
from his instincts leads him to a therapeutic pessimism (as described
above) because it is interpreted within a simple nineteenth-century nat-
uralism. He expresses the relationship of man to nature biologically
instead of historically. Scarcity for Freud is, therefore, seen as an ever-
present condition, imposing the need for dominance and therefore
repression in any possible society. He does not understand man's rela-
tion to nature as an historical process (to be understood dialectically)
in which the domination of nature by man overcomes the very condi-
tions that it arose to meet. He cannot conceive a society in which scar-
city has been overcome and in which man can turn his full attention to
liberating his instincts from repression by the very methods that he
himself has discovered. Thus, he is forced to see the struggle between
Eros and Thanatos as everlasting (I scorn the use of the word eternal in
 Sigmund Freud 341

this debased sense) and one in which there can be no final overcoming
of evil.

According to Hegel, history comes to an end with the dawn of the

age of reason (first realized in his thought, which is no longer philo-
sophia, but sophia itself). So with these marxists, true humanity will
come to be in this world of realized sexuality, in which the orders of
freedom and necessity are at last made one. The ecstatic longing for a
free society that has lain as an illicit dream in the history of mankind
now arises as a concrete possibility before us. ('How're they going to
keep him down on the farm, now that he's seen Paree?') In the full tide
of gnostic prophecy, Marcuse asserts that in such a society man will be
able to conquer his old enemies - time and death. In the world of the
instincts, measured time, the very mark of repression, ceases to exist.
Reconciled at last in the union of freedom and happiness, persons will
choose to go down to the grave when they so desire. Across this blissful
world will fall one shadow - the memory of those in the past who died
in alienation. The Kingdom of Man will thus be darkened, but even this
darkness will be alleviated by the knowledge that evil was not in vain.

There is only space for two comments on this orgasmic gnosticism,

though many more are required.
a) It brings out unequivocally that virtue and vice are not part of the
Freudian account of man. This is often slurred over in North America
because of the very brilliance of Freud's account of the history of the
instincts and the liberating effect the acceptance of that account can
have for us personally. Our debt is so great because Freud shows us in
detail how the very conditions of our early existence twist and chain us
and how we may overcome these distortions of our instincts. Moreover,
to speak theologically, Freud's discoveries give content to the doctrines
of Providence, Fall, and Redemption by showing how we do not move
simply and directly to our end, but must move to it by overcoming the
ambiguities and tragedies that are not accidental, but of the very neces-
sity of our existence. He is closer to the Biblical doctrines of the Fall
and Providence than to the oversimplified Aristotelian teleology that
skirts the question of evil by saying that nature achieves its purpose in
342 Reviews and Essays

the main. To admit this greatness on the part of Freud, however, must
not allow us to forget that his account of man denies the essential prac-
tical truth about us - namely, that we are beings who must choose
between virtue and vice. Nor must we minimize or sentimentalize this
theoretical denial, because society has and will continue to pay a steep
price for it. That this denial is made by Freud is most easily seen in his
account of the structure of the mind as id, ego, and superego. The id is
the determinative aspect of us all. The ego and the superego arise from
it through historical circumstances. Thus, for Freud, thought is some-
how artificial to man, something forced on him by necessity. In his own
words it is 'a detour from the memory of gratification.' But even within
this assumption, he does not think of thought in a way that would make
possible virtue and vice. Thought for him is simply technical reason as
conceived by nineteenth-century scientism. For where the ego is made
the seat of reason, the superego is made the seat of morality. Thus, it is
not reasonable to be moral, and morality belongs less truly to man than
his ability to calculate. If reason is simply a calculating instrument and
cannot teach us to choose between virtuous and vicious acts, then there
is no objective morality in the public or personal sphere.
The orgastic gnostics bring out this theoretical implication with the
greatest clarity, for they openly deny the platitudes of the old rational
morality. The traditional morality presented itself in day-to-day practice
as two simple statements that were taken as self-evident: (i) men should
care not only for themselves but for others; (ii) they should sometimes
control their instinctual appetites in the name of some greater good.
These great platitudes were the court to which the doctrine of virtue
and vice publicly appealed. Of course, the denial of virtue and vice is
part of the whole tradition of modernity. One sees its beginnings in the
arrogant immanentism of Spinoza (i.e., in his attack on the act of
repentance as unworthy of a rational man). But it has never been made
more clearly than in these orgastic gnostics. We may thank them for
this lack of equivocation, for it brings out (what is elsewhere often
slurred over) that the assumptions of modernity cannot consistently
include a doctrine of right and wrong.
Of course, these gnostics have an answer to this criticism that is tradi-
tional among all gnostics. When people achieve genital primacy or
orgastic potency, there will be no need for the idea of virtue, because
the activities that the tradition called vicious will just disappear. Just as
the marxists, true to their dogma that the cause of evil lies in property
relations, believe, therefore, that evil will largely disappear when that
 Sigmund Freud 343

cause has been eliminated, so these gnostics unite as the cause of evil
bad property relations and sexual repression and believe that the over-
coming of both will lead to the good society. Here indeed we come
close to the very centre of modern man's image of himself. Evil is not in
the free will, but arises from the realm of necessity. The most obvious
implication of this is that it cannot be called sin.
b) Although this account of health must be condemned as having
no moral doctrine, it has great religious advantages compared to the
other types of humanism (educated and uneducated) that character-
ize our society. The chief of these is that it is a doctrine of hope, and
Christians must believe that true hope is a virtue even when it has an
inadequate object, just as true charity in an atheist is supernatural.
There is no doubt that the young who read Mailer or Miller' are
attracted to this worship of the orgasm because it seems a true affirma-
tion compared to what they have heard elsewhere. The young are,
after all, reared in a society avid in its concentration on the mortal and
the immanent. Yet in these days of tightened organization and the pos-
sibility of technological nightmare, an immanentism of despair is all
too easy. Such an immanentism is the most influential philosophic
basis for therapy in Europe today (Daseinsanalyse).+ Moreover, in the
tightened society, sexuality is often the only form of creativity left open
to persons and is certainly a more universal foundation of hope than
the aestheticism of the culture addict or the worldly-wise empiricism of
the social engineer. This is true even if we take this orgastic gnosticism
at the point where it is more horrifying to the believer: Reich's^ tech-
niques of overtly sexual therapy (horrifying particularly when applied
to children). Is there riot more hope even here than in the widespread
and indeed indiscriminate use of insulin and electric shock treatment
carried out by order of the social engineers in the name of short-term
adjustment?
Moreover, sexuality is for many the road not only to gratification but
to ecstasy. 'With my body I thee worship.' The object of worship among
the orgastic may be limited to the immanent and may therefore be
justly characterized as idolatry. Nevertheless, in their very worshipping

Norman Mailer (1923- ), American novelist.

Henry Miller (1891-1980), American novelist, best known for Tropic oj Cancer (1934),
which was banned as obscene until 1964.
Existential analysis (German).
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), Austrian psychiatrist who trained under Freud, author of
The Function of the Orgasm (1957).
344 Reviews and Essays

they seem to discover something of the sacred in nature that has been
lost by those held by the philosophy of human power and self-confi-
dence. The rediscovery of that sacredness may be a condition for the
rediscovery of a worship that is more than natural. For all its dangers,
idolatry may be the only road back to worship. To carry this train of
thought further, it would be necessary not only to criticize the modern
view of nature but also to consider why our North American Christian-
ity was so influenced by that view of nature that it failed to have any ade-
quate theology of human love.
Having praised this concept of health for its hope, I must end by
insisting that it fails religiously by placing its hope in life alone. The
truism need hardly be supported here that suffering and death are as
much facts as life and gratification. Yet this gnosticism cannot include
these facts within itself despite all its efforts. The concept of health
given us by Him who says, 'Take up your gallows tree and follow me' is
complete in a way that no modern conception is, because it includes
suffering and death in health, recognizing them not simply as the
negation of happiness, but as the voluntary shedding of the mortal
necessary to the putting on of immortality. Christianity may too often
have forgotten a proper affirmation of life and gratification (and mod-
ern therapy has done well to remind it of this forgetting); but its
incomparable truth has been never to forget that suffering and death
must be included in health as much as life and gratification. Nowhere
has modern psychotherapy more mirrored and influenced our society
of progress than in the way it disregards death or looks at it with
stoicism.

CARL GUSTAVJUNG (1875-1961)

A Swiss psychoanalyst and a rival of Freud, Jung drew widely on myth and
developed the concept of the collective unconscious. His thought was often seen as
religious, in contrast to Freud's aggressive atheism. This essay was the third
broadcast Grant delivered for CBC radio's 'Architects of Modern Thought'
series. The earlier were on Sartre and. Dostoevsky.

... I am deep in Tolstoy and Jung and am finding all sorts of things about myself
that I should have known years ago. In the business of the last years my intellect
 Carl Gustavjung 345

had got detached from my roots and it is wonderful to begin to feel more whole
and less driven by neurotic tension of one kind and another.
- George Grant to John Graham, 12 December 1967

Carl Gustavjung (1962)

In modern psychology two men have been dominant: first the towering
figure of Sigmund Freud and close behind in influence Carl Jung. The
chief mark of our modern civilization has been what we call science. By
this word we mean a particular set of procedures by which men come to
understand the world and so have mastery over it. The application of
these procedures to the study of mind came late in the history of mod-
ern science. They were first used for the study of the physical world and
of the living world. It is only in the last hundred years that they have
been applied to the study of mind. But psychology is a product not only
of science, but also of the art of medicine - the art which is concerned
with the cure of disease - to use a beautiful Greek word, the therapeutic
art. Because medicine these days is so intimately connected with sci-
ence, we often think of the two as if they were the same. But, of course,
they are not, because clearly one can understand something without
wanting to cure it of all its ills. The expert advertising man or the com-
munist brain-washer may have consummate understanding of the
mind, but rather than want to cure he may wish to add to its ills that of
enslavement, so that the enslaver may add to his bankroll or power.
The psychologies of Freud and Jung were as much a product of the
therapeutic art as of scientific understanding. As Jung himself has writ-
ten, 'Our psychology is - practical science. We do research not for the
sake of research but because of our immediate aim of helping. We
could just as well say that science was a by-product of our psychology,
not its main goal, which constitutes a great difference between it and
what is understood by 'academic science.' Neither Freud nor Jung,
therefore, ever divide their account of what the mind is like from what
they think its condition should be - its health, its integration - use what
terms you will. They are not pure scientists and it is indeed a good ques-
tion whether psychology can ever be a pure science - that is, if the truth

George Grant, 'Carl Gustavjung,' in Architects of Modern Thought, 5th and 6th series,
twelve talks by various scholars for CBC Radio (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corpo-
ration 1962), 63-74.
346 Reviews and Essays

about mind can ever be understood if detached from the desire of the
therapist to move minds to their health.
As is true of all intellectuals, the outward events of Jung's life are not
what is important, but rather what he thought and wrote. He was born
in 1875 in Switzerland - the son of a Protestant pastor. In 1900 he grad-
uated in medicine and immediately took up the psychiatric branch of
the art in Switzerland. In 1907 came his first meeting with Freud; he
recognized that Freud's psychoanalytical techniques and theory had
discovered facts which were becoming more and more central for his
own understanding of mental disease. During the next years he worked
closely with Freud in the development of psychoanalysis. In 1913 the
break with Freud came. Jung had criticized some of Freud's theories of
the unconscious in his famous book The Psychology of the Unconscious.
Freud and his disciples were a closed group and intolerant of any dis-
agreement about the central doctrines. They were quite unwilling to
continue co-operation with therapeutic techniques which stemmed
from different dogma. Jung, therefore, had to withdraw from the psy-
choanalytical movement and from then on he called his psychology
'analytical psychology' to distinguish it from dogmatic Freudian psy-
choanalysis. From that day on, Vienna and Zurich became rival Romes
of the psychological church in Europe.
Jung did not die till about a year ago at the age of eighty-six and he
continued as a productive scientist right up till his death. From 1914 to
1960 he carried on his investigations of the unconscious. His output of
work was simply staggering. I think it is fair to say that the output of few
scientists of our era can compare in range and quantity to that of
Jung's. Not only did he continue as a practising therapist, but he con-
stantly lectured on fundamental theory at the great universities of both
East and West. Because he came to believe that the mind was an incom-
parably more complex entity than Freud or the Freudians had thought
it to be, his researches took him into areas far from what is generally
considered psychology. He became, for instance, the greatest inter-
preter of Asian religion to the West, because he saw in Asian religion
remarkable techniques whereby the mind freed itself from ills. Any-
body today who wishes to understand Asian religion would seem to me
to have no alternative but to read Jung. He became an expert on prim-
itive peoples and travelled widely among them because he saw a close
relation between the contents of the unconscious of his Western
patients and the manifestations of the primitive mind in myth and leg-
end. He studied the medieval alchemists because he believed their doc-
 Carl Gustavjung 347

trines were concerned with a scientific approach to human liberation.

According to Jung, their doctrines were really descriptions of the
unconscious and its processes, projected into externalized images.
Indeed, in many ways Jung's chief influence has been outside psychol-
ogy and immediate therapy; rather among those scholars who in our
century have been trying to reach new insights into the civilizations and
religions of the past. Around him in Switzerland there gathered a
group of the learned from a wide variety of disciplines, who were con-
cerned with this question from many angles. Anybody who wants to fol-
low these researches should read the Eranos Yearbooks which are the
proceedings of their yearly meetings.
It was not surprising in the Europe of the twentieth century that this
desire to understand the past should be so actively pursued. Jung's writ-
ings are full of the sense that in our era Western civilization had
entered a time of terrible cataclysm. This manifested itself not only in
the outward events of the two world wars through which he lived and
the potential holocaust now possible through the inventions of modern
physics, but even more in the sense of meaninglessness and purpose-
lessness which Jung considered so much the mark of his patients. He
has said that in nearly all the therapeutic analyses he has undertaken
the most deeprooted problem was always the religious one - that is, the
need for the patient to see some meaning and purpose in his life. It was
his desire to meet this need which led Jung back to the study of Asian
religion and culture and to the study of primitive cultures.
Indeed, whatever else needs to be said about Jung's psychology as a
whole, there is one point where it cannot fail to appeal to the educated
person. He does not treat the past with contempt. One of the most
alarming qualities in many modern scientists has been their discarding
of ancient wisdom, both European and Asian. Their present triumphs
and their faith in the doctrine of progress has made them contemptu-
ous of pre-scientific civilizations and what those civilizations knew
about the proper purposes of human existence. The present state of
our civilization makes that contempt seem pretty juvenile. And it is to
Jung's immense merit that among modern psychologists he is pre-emi-
nent in studying the past not as a home of error and superstition but as
something from which we must learn.
The range and profundity of Jung's writing make it impossible to
encapsulate his teachings about the mind in a few neat sentences. I am
therefore going to speak about what seems central in his thought and
that which most clearly distinguishes his teaching from that of Freud.
348 Reviews and Essays

This is his assertion of the existence of the 'collective unconscious.' It is

important on this continent to emphasize those aspects where he dif-
fers from Freud, because it is here in North America more than any-
where else that the Freudian teachings have been most influential
among practising therapists. Indeed, in North America Jung's influ-
ence among psychiatrists and psychologists has been minimal.
What Jung means by the 'collective unconscious' can best be
described by stating his agreement with the Freudian doctrine of the
unconscious and also where he differs from it. It was Freud who
brought back into Western thought the conception of the unconscious:
that is, the idea that the mind is made up of two spheres - first, those
events of which we are conscious and, secondly, another sphere of psy-
chic life of which we are not conscious. The metaphor which has been
continually used to illuminate this is the iceberg. The conscious is the
eleventh part of the iceberg which is visible above the ocean; the
unconscious is the ten-elevenths which lies hidden in the deep. Freud
made clear to modern men that their mental ills were often caused by
conflicts in the unconscious and conflicts between the conscious and
unconscious. He also saw that the unconscious manifests itself in our
dreams so that the therapist by analyzing the dreams of his patients can
help them to understand their conflicts by lifting them into conscious-
ness and so to begin to overcome them. In such conceptions as the
'Oedipus complex,' Freud stated the causes of repression and gave
some content to the unconscious. The scientific and rationalist West,
which had cut itself off from any knowledge of the depths of the mind,
owes an immense debt to Freud for his rediscovery of the ten-elevenths
of the iceberg.
Jung took from Freud the conception of the mind as made up of
both a conscious and an unconscious sphere. But he says that the
unconscious itself must be divided into two spheres - the realm for the
'personal unconscious' and the realm of the 'collective unconscious.'
The 'collective unconscious' is not made up of material which belongs
to any individual history, but, to use Jung's own words, comes 'from the
inherited possibility of psychical functioning in general; namely, from
the inherited brain structure.' Or again in his own words, 'the collec-
tive unconscious is the mighty spiritual inheritance of human develop-
ment, reborn in every individual.' It is this collective realm of the
unconscious which is most deeply buried and which presents the most
difficult problem to the therapist. The very words 'reborn in every indi-
vidual,' which Jung uses to describe it, shows immediately his debt to
 Carl Gustavjung 349

Buddhism with its central doctrine of the cycle of rebirths which are
necessary to the law of karma and from which the enlightened alone
escape. How different is his way of speaking from 'the once and for all'
event language of Christianity.
The ordering content of the 'collective unconscious' Jung calls the
'archetypes.' The Oxford dictionary defines the word 'archetype' as
'original model.'Jung means by it 'self-portrait of the instincts.' But by
instincts he does not mean anything individual but rather universal -
the very patterns of behaviour which have been with man always. As the
language of the unconscious in dreams is that of imaginative symbol,
they appear in dreams as universal figures. Thus, for instance, the
archetype 'mother 1 or 'great mother' appears in dreams in many
forms. But what makes it an archetype is that 'mother' pre-exists in our
unconscious every worldly manifestation of the motherly, and has
existed in the unconscious of man so long as man has been man. We
must not turn these archetypes into concepts and make out that the
archetype of 'mother' is the universal concept of 'motherliness.'
Rather, the archetypes are universal psychic forces which we can only
begin to touch in experience.
When we experience these archetypes at all consciously, we are
touching in our individual lives the whole task of humanity at all times
and so are in a sense outside time. Jung indeed says that when we re-
activate the contents of the collective unconscious by opening our-
selves to the archetypes we have experience of the eternal. The word
eternal is here used in no transcendent sense. It is timeless but in the
world. What I think he means is that in re-activating the collective
unconscious we cease to be simply individual human beings and par-
take of 'human beingness' in general. And the more archetypes we re-
activate through analysis, the more we have entered into the fullness of
being men. The neglect of them is the final cause of all neurotic and
psychotic disorders.
Such an account of the collective unconscious clearly distinguishes
Jung from Freud both in their science and in their therapy. It can not
just be added on to the personal unconscious, as if Freud and Jung
agreed about the conscious and the personal unconscious and then on
top (or better at the bottom) Jung added the collective unconscious.
On the contrary, it leads to clear distinction between their two accounts
of the human condition - healthy or unhealthy. Freud is clearly here a
Western man, moulded by the tradition of Semitic religion, and there-
fore thinks that what is ultimately real is the individual and his instincts.
350 Reviews and Essays

This is not so for Jung. A man becomes a man as he re-activates the eter-
nal archetypes, as he partakes in them. In this sense the individual per-
son is not an ultimate any more than he is an ultimate in the great
religions of the East. This very profound difference is apparent in what
a Freudian and Jungian would mean by a successful analysis - or to put
it simply, what is the goal of psychoanalysis?
To a Freudian the goal is to come to terms with one's own instincts.
In Freudian language the 'ego' and the 'super-ego' and 'id' can
through analysis come to live together. But such a living together can
only be a compromise because the pleasure seeking of the id has to be
limited by the reality principle so that people can go on living in the
world. This is why there are such stoical and ironical undertones in
Freud - to be successfully analyzed is to make the best of a bad job - to
reach some compromise between reality and pleasure seeking. The
goal of a successful analysis with Jung, on the other hand, is integration,
that is, the combination of all the mental forces into a whole. And this
immensely optimistic goal is possible because of his postulated eternal
experience of touching the universal archetypes. Just compare Freud's
Civilization and Its Discontents with Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul
and one sees how incomparably more optimistic Jung is about the goal
of analysis - and please let me make it quite clear that I do not use opti-
mistic as a word of praise or blame. To say that a person's account of
the human condition is more optimistic than another's is to say noth-
ing about its truth.
From the foregoing it is easy to see why Jung has devoted so much
time to the study of myth. He came to realize that the same material
manifested itself in the mythic religion of primitive peoples as it did in
the unconscious. The 'great mothers,' the 'trees of the world,' the 'wise
old men,' which he had discovered in the unconscious, are of course
the very stuff of the primitive peoples. Also, archaic religions have
always been immensely aware of the need to integrate the soul and have
been full of differing ways of achieving such integration. Jung studied
such phenomena as a means of improving his techniques of therapy,
and also to learn more of the very content of the unconscious.
Indeed, Jung believes that it is just because Western man has cut him-
self off from the depths of the unconscious that he has become irreli-
gious and so lives in confusion. Our world is emptied inwardly as we
think of religion as either nothing or else concerned with non-dynamic
intellectual convictions; it is rationalized outwardly in a society domi-
nated by its technical apparatus. So, cut off by such rationalism from
 Carl Gustavjung 351

the eternal archetypes, man in the West must become ever more prone
to outward violence and inward meaninglessness. At this point Jung is
particularly condemnatory of Western Protestantism which cut itself off
from the whole world of symbol and myth and ritual and so con-
demned itself to be out of touch with the wholeness of archetypes. Jung
is more friendly towards Catholicism because it has never attempted so
to rationalize itself. When in the 1950s the Pope promulgated the doc-
trine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Jung hailed it as one of
the crucial acts of our era because in it the feminine was taken back
into the Godhead.
But - and this is a very large but - in thinking aboutjung's interest in
religion or in myth one must be clear that it is a very particular kind of
interest. He always views religion or myth (and I do not use the words
synonymously) as they serve the mental health of human beings. I think
this is important because many clerics and theologians have main-
tained that Jung is a truly religious psychologist while Freud is essen-
tially irreligious. I am not sure that the people who make these
statements are really looking for their allies in the right place. These
statements are made because it seems at first sight clear that Jung gives
a more creative role to myth and religion than Freud does. To Freud all
religion was mythical and the mythical arose as a response to a diseased
psychological condition. The domination of the patriarchal father led
to a belief in the existence of the first person of the Trinity. Such super-
stitions will drop away if we have had a successful analysis. Religion is a
corporate neurosis of mankind which falls away from the wiser mem-
bers of society in the age of scientific enlightenment. Compared to this
negative approach to religion, Jung's insistence on the wisdom of reli-
gious cultures is refreshing to the believer and it is because of this that
Protestant and more often Catholic clerics have seen him as an ally.
I think those who talk this way often seem to forget that Jung is not
concerned with the truth or falsity of any particular religion; nor, as far
as myth is concerned, with what transcendent reality is manifested in it.
It is surely clear that the men of the ancient religious cultures when
they apprehended myth thought they were apprehending the real and
knew that the real so apprehended always led them to particular forms
of conduct. They thought they were being opened to an absolute and
universal reality. Now it is clear that Jung does not think this. When
men come upon the archetypes of the collective unconscious they are
concerned with the integration of their own psyches, not with being
lifted to another realm of reality, the realm of the spirit. In other words,
352 Reviews and Essays

Jung is concerned with myth in quite a different way from those who
live in myth. They are concerned with being opened to reality; he is
concerned with it as a psychological aid.
And this distinction becomes even more important when we pass
beyond the limited subject of Jung's relation to myth and look at his
relation to the living religions of the Western world. He is concerned
with them insofar as the practice of them is an aid to the mental health
of the practitioner. But he is not concerned with whether the affirma-
tions these religions make about reality are true or false. Indeed,
although he is cagey about this point in his voluminous writings, I think
it can be fairly deduced that he thinks that the affirmations of Western
religion about reality are nonsense. Now it does not seem to me that any
serious adult practitioner of a religion can simply disregard whether
what his religion says about ultimate reality is true or false. Can he just
practise it for the good of his mental health if he think what it says is
nonsense? It is surely particularly difficult to take this attitude to the
Semitic religions of the West-Judaism and Christianity - both of which
clearly involve making statements about reality. In other words, I don't
think we can get away from the fact that Jung's relation to Western reli-
gion is one of patronizing. Is one more a friend of Western religion if
one directly assails it like Freud or if one covertly patronizes it like Jung?
I have emphasized Jung's doctrine of the collective unconscious and
his interest in myth and religion because it is relevant to the chief way
in which Jung is an architect of modern thought. He is the leading
exponent of Asian religion in the West. I don't see how anyone can
take at its face value Jung's claim to be an empirical scientist - in any
clearly defined sense of the word empirical - any more than one can
take Freud's claim to be chiefly a scientist and not essentially a meta-
physician and a prophet. Nevertheless, Jung must be regarded with the
utmost seriousness because more than any other man of this century
he has made Asian religion a living force in the West. And surely one of
the key developments of our age is the spreading of the thought of the
Orient through the Occident. The Western invasion of the world in the
last centuries is such an obvious fact that we are inclined to forget how
much influence has been reciprocal. And this process has been going
on for some time. As early as 1625 there was a Chair of Oriental Studies
at the University of Utrecht. Since that time, Asia has been a growing
influence in the lives of European intellectuals. In our era it has
become a flood touching not only the intellectual elite but all parts of
our society. We are influenced not so much by such open missionaries
 Carl Gustavjung 353

as Dr Suzuki but rather by Western people who consciously or uncon-

sciously believe Asian religion (most often Buddhism, but sometimes
Hinduism) to be true. A conscious example at a brilliant popular level
are the Buddhist novels of J.D. Salinger.' The historian Arnold Toyn-
bee+ is another example — although it is difficult to know how con-
scious Toynbee is about his beliefs. But by far the most influential and
effective exponent of Asian religion has been Jung. When I say Asian
religion there are clearly Hindu influences in Jung's account of the
psyche - but more obviously present are the influences of Buddhism.
The evidence for this is not found primarily in Jung's direct writings
on Eastern religion - for instance, his interpretation of the mandalas
(or magic circles) which are unifying symbols for the personality, or his
interest in the quadernity (the fourfold) in distinction to the trinity. It
lies rather in the fact that his psychology and Asian religion are con-
cerned with the same questions - have the same centre. They both deal
with the liberation of the soul as it discovers itself as immortal. They are
both concerned with the means whereby the individual can experience
immortality - and let me emphasize that experience is here the key
word - the realization of timeless being in oneself. For Jung this is
achieved when the opposing aspects of the soul, male and female, good
and evil, are experienced not as opposites but as one.
To put the matter negatively, I think one can see how little Jung's
religion has to do with traditional Western religion if one recognizes
what is implied in this doctrine of the union of contraries. To Jung,
God is an experience in the soul which can only be realized when we
have overcome the opposition between good and evil. Integration -
call it if you will enlightenment - is beyond good and evil. But such a
doctrine unequivocally breaks with the main stream of Western reli-
gion. Moreover, it totally undermines the Western view of existence as
essentially moral. It is surely no accident that Jung grew up in that Ger-
manic generation which was so deeply shaped by Nietzsche. For

D.T. Suzuki, author of Studies in Zen Budhism and in Grant's words, 'The chief missionary
of Buddhism in the United States.' See George Grant, 'Philosophy and Religion,' in The
Great Ideas Today, 1961 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1961), 362.
J.D. Salinger (1916- ), American novelist and short story writer, author of Catcher in the
Rye (1951). 'Zen artists paint Zen pictures and Zen poets compose Zen poems. The voice
of Zen is heard in the novels of J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac.' Grant, 'Philosophy and
Religion,' 362.
A.J. Toynbee (1889-1975), influential British historian, author of A Study oj History, 12
vols. (1934-61). Grant met Tovnbee at Oxford earlv in the Second World War.
354 Reviews and Essays

Nietzsche's attack on Semitic religion went more to the heart than any
other of the many attacks which have characterized the last centuries;
and it was made exactly at this point - man should pass beyond good
and evil. The only time that Jung ever spoke unequivocally and at
length about his antipathy to Biblical religion was in his brilliant and
witty commentary on the book of Job.
Those clerics and theologians who say that Jung is an essentially reli-
gious psychologist are then right - but it depends on what religion they
are talking about. For the common liberal platitude that all religions
are the same is an obvious fallacy. Now it may be that the Catholic theo-
logians in France are right and that in our era the greatest task of Chris-
tianity is not to take marxism into itself or to come to terms with the
Prometheanism of science but to include Buddhism within the univer-
sal faith. It is not easy to speak quickly about such matters because they
raise subtle matters of principle and anything one says may sound on
the one side like ignorant imperialism or on the other like vague eclec-
ticism. One thing can, however, be said with certainty. As one looks at
the history of the race, two figures tower above the rest-Jesus the Christ
and Siddharta Gotauma, the Sammasambuddha, that is, the fully self-
enlightened one. Presumably also, if a religion is catholic, all may and
can be included within it. But certainly this is not what is present in
Jung's mind. It is implied in every line he writes that what is true in
Western religion can be included in the much richer religions of the
East. In this sense he is an incomparably greater radical than Freud; for
he is attacking the roots of Western civilization. Freud, after all, only
attacks Semitic religion from within its own assumptions. But Jung, for
all his surface conservatism and appeal to the past, attacks these very
assumptions - the concrete historical person in the face of the transcen-
dent. Those who do not see this radial centre of Jung's thought have
chiefly been prevented from seeing it because they have accepted, in
most cases unconsciously, Hegel's and Marx's accounts of Asian history.

HAROLD ADAMS INNIS (1894-1952)

Harold Innis was the first Canadian-born social scientist to achieve an interna-
tional reputation. He was a distinguished economic historian, and in his later
work he tried to understand the reasons for the decay and collapse of civilizations
 Harold Adams Innis 355

by studying their modes of communication. Although Grant was initially sympa-

thetic to Innis, as his comments in the 'Philosophy'article included in Part Two
of this book shoiv, he later concluded that Innis's work was brilliant but limited.
Innis was too much the social scientist to plunge into the mystery of existence.

The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis (1980)*

H.A. Innis was a Canadian who was outstanding at what he did, by any
standards anywhere in the world. He became a famous historian of the
fur, fish, and lumber trades early in his life. But he did not stick with his
specialism. By the end of his life he was writing books which looked
deeply at the question: What is human being? For example, his
thoughts about the different means of communication (speech, books,
radio, TV) and what can be communicated by each particular means
was the influence from which the writings of Marshall McLuhan' have
come forth.
But beyond such particulars, anybody who has read his last books will
know that they cannot look at human history quite the same way again.
He became a famous man in the Western intellectual world and was
offered big jobs in the powerful American academia and the cultivated
British version. He stayed in Canada because it was his own and he
ambiguously loved it. His admirers were grateful to the University of
Toronto when it gave his name to one of its colleges after his death in
1952.

We have in front of us a readable and fascinating book. The sheer

range of Innis's interests must have made editing difficult. In a couple
of pages he can move from comments on American and Canadian pol-
itics to the influence of India on Christian ideas, to the dependence of
modern journalism on cable rates, to the worship of Isis, to the signifi-
cance of the elevator for business. To present such far-seeing curiosity
in readable form was difficult, and Christian has succeeded. Wisely, he

George Grant, review of The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis, ed. William Christian (Tor-
onto: University of Toronto Press 1980), Globe and Mail, 13 May 1980, E12.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-81), Canadian social critic and communications theorist who
was deeply indebted to Innis's communication studies for his own insights.
356 Reviews and Essays

edited the material in chronological order, so that we can see Innis's

thought unfold in the last pregnant years of his life.
When I say it is a good read, I mean that in a particular way. One can-
not read it like John Le Carre's stories - a breathless suspense-filled
pursuit into the middle of the night. One cannot read it like [Charles
Dickens's] Bleak House- an engrossment in a unified work of art with all
its magic and wonder. This book is made up of small entries (six or
seven a page) ranging over the reaches of human time and space. One
simply gets indigestion if one reads too much of it at a sitting. I found
the best way to read it was to put it next to my bed, read five pages a
night, pay attention to what interested me and then put out the light.
In the best sense of the phrase, it is a book that puts one to sleep. One
takes into one's dreams the strange thoughts circling through time and
space.
What was Innis? A philosopher? A social scientist? A historian? Little
category boxes may seem Procrustean. Nevertheless, it is necessary to
ask the question, because in trying to answer it, one makes explicit what
one is learning from his writing. Certainly he was not a social scientist
in the dominant sense of that activity. He did not see knowledge as
something that gave us control, but as to be pursued for the sake of
sheer curiosity alone. At the practical level, he wrote with brutal clarity
about what would happen to universities which became servants of the
institutions which dished out the research grants. He saw the proper
university as the institution in society which served the pure desire to
know, even if that meant that it remained small and poor and uninflu-
ential. His account of social science is then very far from that in the
great modern apparatuses of science.
On the other hand, Innis cannot be called a philosopher. He was a
scientist in the sense that what he asked about anything, past or
present, was how it worked. He did not ask those questions which
belong traditionally to philosophy: What for? Whither? And what then?
He was too much the secularised sceptic not to believe that those ques-
tions really had little point. His explanations were all in terms of the
modern account of explanation: How did this social organization
work? To put it mildly, the eternal was not his dish.
Innis never seems to have come to terms with this division in his
work: he took methods from the moderns, but his motives for doing sci-

John Le Carre (David Cornwell) (1931- ), probably the greatest writer of Cold War spy
stories and one of Grant's favourite novelists.
 Northrop Frye 357

ence came from the ancients. He was at one and the same time both
toughly cynical about modern social science, and sadly doubtful about
the claims of the older science. The result is a kind of sadness in his
work - even if it is a sadness well penetrated by wit and anger. Perhaps
it is this ambiguity which has prevented Innis from having the continu-
ing influence appropriate to a person of his high style. Nevertheless, it
would be a shame if Innis did not continue to be read, particularly in
the light of how tedious modern social science often is. His writing con-
tinually lights up whole areas of human history. And we need this light.

NORTHROP FRYE (1912-91)

Northrop Frye was the foremost Canadian literary critic of his generation and his
work was renowned around the world. However, Grant did not admire Frye's
style of criticism. He had praised Frye's work in his 1951 'Philosophy' article, but
he later became more critical. He thought thatFrye's literary treatment of the Bible
was a form of secularized Christianity that debased the spiritual greatness of the
Gospels.

I hope I did not attack Protestantism in my review of Frye, but only secularized
Protestantism - quite another matter. I disliked the book because he was supe-
rior about the Gospels, which in my opinion are perfect.
- George Grant to Jonathan Mills, 19 March 1982

The Great Code (1982)

This book about the Bible is written by a distinguished Canadian pro-

fessor of English literature. I do not use the adjective 'Canadian' to
qualify 'distinguished,' but rather because it is pleasant to associate dis-
tinction with one's country. The title of the book comes from William
Blake's' remark: 'The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of

George Grant, review of Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible as Literature, Globe and
Mail, 27 February 1982, E17.
William Blake (1757-1827), British poet, artist, and visionary. Frye's Fearful Symmetry was
the classic stuck of Blake.
358 Reviews and Essays

Art.' The second half of Frye's title is slightly ambiguous because it

might imply that he is primarily discussing how the Bible has influ-
enced the literature of the West, and English literature in particular.
This is not the case. Rather, he is concentrating on the Bible itself, and
using his powers as a careful student of literature to explicate what is
present in it.
Reviews of books often have the perfectly proper function of making
a synopsis of a book so that others can be saved the trouble of reading
it, either because of a lack of interest in the material or because they
already know it. I think this would be inevitably Procrustean in this
case, and therefore I am not going to do it. The Bible is a large collec-
tion of very disparate books. Fry has read these books. He writes at
length about them not only as a professor of literature, but as a person
ready to make assertions coming from many fields of study - particu-
larly theological and anthropological. Those who wish to know what is
in Frye's book have no alternative to reading it.
Rather, I wish to say what kind of book this is, and where such a kind
fits into the history and present state of studies. Art, in the sense of fine
art, often is a kind of religion in our age, because it appears as a means
of transcending society at a time when other means of such transcen-
dence are no longer available for many people, particularly the edu-
cated. This deepest desire of human beings finds itself frustrated, and
seeks its satisfaction in the arts, both past and present. At the same
time, our era is concentrated on the science which issues in the con-
quest of human and non-human nature. The search for this knowledge
has been institutionalized in our multiversities. When these two ten-
dencies come together, the arts are brought into the universities to be
classified.
But, of course, literature is not an object at our disposal, as the atom
may be. Its organization does not result in bombs. The scientizing of lit-
erature is carried out by methods comparable with the work of Lin-
naeus. He catalogued and categorized the plants and animals so that
they would lie before us in an intelligible arrangement.
Frye has been the leader of this form of the study of literature. In
modern language, he has brought system to the given which lies before
us. (The ancients thought that system was something appropriate to
things such as armies, not to studies.) In this present book, the Bible is
laid before us by the categories of language, myth, metaphor, and
typology. Frye has read this literature with thoroughness. So many of us
academics are lazy and Frye is free of that vice.
 Northrop Frye 359

Indeed, Frye's interest in these writings both aids and stands in the
way of his science as objective. It stands in the way because what often
seems to lie before him is not those writings as they were in their origi-
nating moment, but rather as the Protestant Bible, which has come
down to us from five centuries of English-speaking Calvinist reading.
This may seem to be contradicted by the amount of time that Frye gives
to arguing with contemporary fundamentalists. But this is rather the
impatience one feels toward relations who have not arrived socially. Be
that as it may, Frye's passionate interest in the Protestant Bible gives a
bite to his science. I think chapters six and seven are the best in the
book because here the Bible itself is most present.
To repeat, there is much in the book beyond the science of litera-
ture. There are many general theological pronouncements. (By 'theo-
logical pronouncements' I do not mean statements about theological
pronouncements, but direct theological statements.) Some of these
hit the nail right on the head with that fine shrewdness which is so
much a part of Frye's writing. But in a way which is again very Protes-
tant, he makes these statements (for instance, his remarks on proph-
ecy) as though they were factual rather than his interpretation. That
is, he writes theology as though it were not dependent on philosophy.
When these theological obiter dicta are directly philosophical, the
confusion in his method and material is compounded. For example,
Frye uses the words 'the master-slave dialectic on which the whole of
human history turns.' Presumably, he knows that in making this state-
ment, he has affirmed that modern political philosophy is superior to
ancient political philosophy. After all, it is this affirmation more than
any other which distinguishes modern from ancient political philoso-
phy. In saying this, Frye shows he is judging the Bible through the eyes
of modern philosophy. Why, then, does he then not say so? It would
make things easier.
This comes out clearly in Frye's relation to the seventeenth-century
Italian philosopher, Vico. He uses Vice's account of three stages in the
history of language. With a philosopher of the order of Vico, one can-
not accept such a part of his thought without being in closeness to his
thought as a whole. Frye understands this because, later in his book, he
expresses agreement with Vice's verum factum (we only know what we
make). But in such agreement, he has committed himself to look at
the Bible in a certain way - that is, through modern spectacles. To put
the same point in another way: one has chosen to look at the Bible not
as its writers looked at it.
360 Reviews and Essays

For example, it is inconceivable that any of the writers of the Gospels

could have thought the verum factum a true account of truth. It is of
course quite proper for Frye to look at the Bible as a modern. But, to
repeat, this should have been made much more explicit. It would then
be clearer to the reader that what we get about the Bible in this book
are not only conclusions from the science of criticism, but also what a
well-educated secularized Protestant gets from a careful reading of
these books.
Such a reading cannot but be deeply unsympathetic to what was
believed to be known about the Bible from that long co-operation
between philosophy and Biblical scholarship which was at the heart of
centuries of the tradition. The great Islamic theologian El Farabi wrote
that Plato's Republic was the most important writing about prophecy.
Whatever other differences there were between Islam, Christianity, and
Judaism over the centuries, the leading theologians would have been in
near agreement about such a statement. For example, there were no
equivalents in the Bible for ideas such as 'nature' or 'history,' and
therefore thinkers knew that they had to look elsewhere for such neces-
sary means of interpretation.
This was not to lower the status of scripture, but to exalt it as proph-
ecy. Frye does not seem nearly as aware as the older scholars of the
need to find the best means for understanding the Bible. His interpre-
tation in terms of modern philosophy is not laid before us en pleine con-
naissance de cause.
The part of Frye's book with which he seems to come nearest to
unthoughtful prejudice contains his remarks about polytheism. He
assumes that polytheism as a believable option only existed at a more
primitive time in the history of the race and that educated human
beings could only look at it as archaic. By 'believable option' I mean
that educated men could think that there are gods. It is a fact, never-
theless, that the greatest thinker of our era, Heidegger, was a polythe-
ist. When the founder of modern existentialism thought through the
consequences of existentialism, he stated that there are gods. Heideg-
ger does not make mistakes in logic or grammar, and he has said,
'Only a god can save us.' He is not confused about the difference
between 'a god' and God. A saint of our era, Simone Weil, has written
of the terrible consequences of the destruction of idolatry within

Grant perhaps meant Plato's Laws.

 Dennis Lee 361

Christianity. The patronizing eye that Frye casts upon polytheism

seems again to arise from the limitations of his scientism in its Protes-
tant form.
Philosophy is always and everywhere the enemy of the opinions of
any society, however much philosophers may have to conceal that
enmity. The reason that Frye does not make his assumptions explicit
may be because he is such a good friend of modern society. His account
of what is present in the Bible as seen through the categories of meta-
phor, language, myth, and typology is full of interesting understand-
ings. It is the product of hard work and of a zetetic intelligence. But it
is a modernized Protestant intelligence. And such intelligence has
been the most formative basis of our North American society.

DENNIS LEE (1939-)

Dennis Lee is one of Canada 's leading contemporary poets - Grant especially
admired his Civil Elegies andThe Death of Harold Ladoo — and one of the
country's finest editors. He was largely responsible for the shape of Grant's first
collection of essays in 1969, and he also assisted Grant greatly with his last col-
lection in 1986. In return, Grant helped Lee to understand his visions into the
unfolding of the modern world. This essay is one of Grant's rare forays into liter-
ary criticism.

Dennis Lee - Poetry and Philosophy (1982)+

It is surprising for modern readers to find that a fifth of Aristotle's

great book on ethics is devoted to friendship. I intend to write of Den-

In a passage that seems to refer to this criticism, Frye wrote: 'There seems little interest
in reviving gods or nature spirits: in contemporary academic journals references to
Nietzsche and Heidegger are all over the place, but nobody seems to want to buy
Nietzsche's Antichrist Dionysus or Heidegger's murky and maudlin polytheism.'
Northrop Frye. 'The Expanding World of Metaphor' (1984), in Myth and Metaphor:
Selected Essays 1974- 19HH, ed. R.D. Denham (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press
1990). 121.
George Grant, 'Dennis Lee - Poetry and Philosophy,' in Tasks of Passion: Dennis Lee at
Mid-C.areer. ed. Karen Mulhallen, et al. (Toronto: Descant Editions 1982), 229-35.
362 Reviews and Essays

nis Lee as a friend because friendship is a form of love and love illumi-
nates the intellect. In that illumination we come to know things about
other people. The Platonic affirmation that our intelligences are illu-
minated by love has been darkened in our era both because our chief
paradigm of knowledge concerns objects, that is, things held away from
us so that we can master them, and also because the preeminence we
give to sexuality leads us to interpret all forms of love as too simply
dependent on instinct. For example, Laurel and Hardy have been
interpreted as completely understandable as homosexual lovers. Such
a Procrustean statement prevents us from understanding the many
forms of love. I mean by friendship a relation between equals interested
in certain common purposes which transcend either partner of the
friendship. Such a relation allows one of the parties to see things about
the other party. When one of the parties is a poet such things are of
more than personal interest.
Yet I am very hesitant to write of Lee just because he is a poet. The
accidents of my life have left me with a deeply neurotic fear of poetry.
Apart from the uninteresting personal reasons for this, it is clear that
the rejection of poetry in its completeness is widespread in modern
society, and is closely related to the rejection of philosophy as more
than analysis and ideology. The central reason for those rejections is
that the control which is necessary to human beings who would be mas-
ters of the earth is the enemy of receptivity, without which there cannot
be poetry or philosophy. By receptivity I do not chiefly mean that which
is necessary in listening to poetry, but that which is necessary to writing
it. Plato was indeed exalting poetry when he said that it was imitation;
moderns denigrate poetry (indeed make it impossible) when they say
that it is creation. To talk of 'the creative artist' is a contradiction in
terms. For the poet is the being who must be immediately open to all
that is, and who proclaims to others the immediate truth of what is.
That openness, that receptivity, that imitation, is an ability difficult to
sustain in a world where control for mastery is the paragon of human
endeavour. Of course, poetry is so fundamental a stance, belonging to
the deepest level of what it is to be human, that it cannot be destroyed
amongst us; but it is liable to appear in our society as entertainment, as
a turfing of the grave. As such its proclamations can neither be easily
proclaimed nor heard.
Indeed, at the heart of the tradition there has been a debate (of cen-
tral importance in understanding politics) about the relation between
the proclamations of poetry and those of philosophy. Is Heidegger
 Dennis Lee 363

right in saying that poetry and philosophy live at the top of two separate
mountains? Or is Plato right that politics demands that poetry be min-
isterial to the truths of philosophy? But this debate can only be private
and even secret in this era where only with the greatest difficulty can we
participate in philosophy or poetry, as they are in themselves. When
people have to hang on to what little they can make of these saving
graces in the midst of the drive to change the world, it is hardly neces-
sary to debate their relation. What is needed is to experience their heal-
ing balm.
My hesitation in writing about Lee's poems is, then, because the
modern drive to control has vitiated my listening to what poetry pro-
claims. Therefore, I must proceed to thinking about them through the
memory of meeting him when he was a young man. Memories can, I
trust, throw light on his poetry.
It was in the baleful glare which the Vietnam War threw on the
United States and Canada that I first had the good fortune to become a
friend of Lee's. In a fast-changing technological society, memory is put
in question. It is difficult even to remember how many people were illu-
mined by the sinister light of that war, whatever little public conse-
quence that illumination has had. What struck me about Lee at that
time was that of all the academics who were rightly moved by the
searchlight of that war, he was the one who saw that at the heart of
those events was an affirmation about 'being.' That affirmation (call it,
if you will, a statement about the nature of the whole) shaped what
came forth in the actions of our dominant classes. Along with many
others he saw that Canada was part of an empire which was trying to
impose its will by ferocious means right around the other side of the
globe. He saw with many others that Canada was complicit in the acts of
that empire and that that complicity was expressed in the politics of
Lester Pearson. He saw with some others that the technological multi-
versity was not outside that complicity but central to it. This was true
not only in the obviously technological parts of the university, but had
taken hold in the very way that the liberal arts were practised.
It is more difficult to express what Lee so evidently saw beyond this.
As words fail, let me try. He understood that at the heart of our civiliza-
tion lay an affirmation about 'being' which was that civilization's neces-
sity. The rampaging decadence of imperial war was not to be explained
(within liberalism) as an aberration of our good system; it was not to be
explained (within marxism) as something understood in terms of the
dynamics of capitalism. In the very roots of Western civilization lay a
364 Reviews and Essays

particular apprehension of 'being.' From that apprehension arose not

only imperial war, not only the greedy structure of our society, but also
the nature of the multiversity and of poetry, the culture of the cosmop-
olis and the forms of our sexuality. When Lee left Victoria College he
was not only saying with Chomsky that through research and consulta-
tion these institutions had become part of the war machine, but that
their very understanding of knowledge, and in particular the under-
standing of poetry, came forth from an affirmation of 'being,' the
essence of which made poetry part of a museum culture. In that sense
it determined what could be 'poiesis.'
Lee saw that the turn of the screw in that situation was that this affir-
mation of 'being,' which was so necessary to articulate if we were to be
free of it, was almost impossible to articulate because the very language
which we could use for that articulation arose from the affirmation
itself. It was therefore almost impossible to transcend it by knowing it.
Lee expressed so clearly the baffling search to find language to speak
what we are, when what is determining what we are has taken hold of
language to fashion it into an instrument of its controlling power. The
attempt to articulate our 'being' was therefore to enter the sad walks of
impotence. What had happened to language was not only in the absur-
dities of advertising, the literature of entertainment, and the preten-
sions of journalism, but in the very studies of language in which Lee
had been trained so well. Language described as the house of being is
likely to hide the extent to which we are squeezed in that vice. It is per-
haps Heidegger's continuing pride in his Europeanness (despite all
that has been) which makes this description slightly more cosy than
Lee as a North American would allow.
Lee has not rested in this impotence, or he would not be a poet.
Instead he has turned the experience itself into poetry. The last verse of
The Gods achieves a magnificent stance, while acknowledging the price
he must pay - a limitation on his speaking, a limitation of his knowing.
Naturally, his own words describe it best.

for to secular men there is not given the glory of tongues, yet it is
better to speak in silence than squeak in the gab of the age
and if I cannot tell your terrifying
praise, how Hallmark gabble and chintz nor least of all

Noam Chomsky (1928—), American linguist and conspiracy theorist; a fierce critic of the
Vietnam War.
 Dennis Lee 365

what time and dimensions your naked incursions

announced, you scurrilous powers yet
still I stand against this bitch of a shrunken time
in semi-faithfulness
and whether you are godhead or zilch of daily ones like before
you strike our measure still and still you
endure as my murderous fate, though I
do not know you.

It is Lee's openness to the whole which enables him to face the posi-
tion from which as poet he must struggle to be. The question of the
whole is present for him in all the parts including the parts which are
his own living. What is meant by openness to the whole has been
dimmed because the modern era has become a self-fulfilled prophecy.
Modern scientists like the modern thinkers in Swift's Battle of the Books
explain nature, human and non-human, without the idea of soul, and
not surprisingly they have produced a world where it is difficult to think
what it is to be open to the whole. Ancient thinkers are compared to the
bee which goes around collecting honey from the flowers; modern
thinkers are compared to the spider which spins webs out of itself and
then catches its food in that web. If the search for honey is not the
source of poetry, what is?
Indeed, Lee has described that openness beautifully when he
described his vocation as listening to a cadence ('Cadence, Country,
Silence,' Open Letter, Fall 1973, Toronto). The importance of the idea of
cadence for understanding what poetry and music are can be seen in
the fact that the most appropriate comment on it are the words about
his own art by a genius of the supreme order.

The question is how my art proceeds in writing and working our great
and important matters. I can say no more than this, for I know no more
and can come upon nothing further. When I am well and have good sur-
roundings, travelling in a carriage, or after a good meal or a walk or at
night when I cannot sleep, then ideas come to me hest and in torrents.
Where they come from and how they come I just do not know. I keep in
my head those that please me and hum them aloud as others have told
me. When I have all that carefully in my head, the rest comes quickly, one
thing after another; I see where such fragments could be used to make a
composition of them all, by employing the rules of counterpoint and the
sound of different instruments etc. My soul is then on fire as long as I am
366 Reviews and Essays

not disturbed; the idea expands, I develop it, all becoming clearer and
clearer. The piece becomes almost complete in my head, even it if it a
long one, so that afterwards I see it in my spirit all in one look, as one sees
a beautiful picture or a beautiful human being. I am saying that in imagi-
nation I do not understand the parts one after another, in the order that
they ought to follow in the music; I understand them altogether at one
moment. Delicious moments. When the ideas are discovered and put into
a work, all occurs in me as in a beautiful dream which is quite lucid. But
the most beautiful is to understand it all at one moment. What has hap-
pened I do not easily forget and this is the best gift which our God has
given me. When it afterwards comes to writing, I take out of the bag of my
mind what had previously gathered into it. Then it gets pretty quickly put
down on paper, being strictly, as was said, already perfect, and generally
in much the same way as it was in my head before. (Mozarts Briefe, ed. L.
Nohl, 2nd edition, pp. 443-44.)

These words are perhaps not a perfect fit for what Lee is saying about
cadence. Yet I always hold both statements together because in both of
them the difficult question of the relation between hearing and seeing
- the sense so related to time, the sense so related to space - is under-
stood as this relation is illuminated in poetry and music. (I never
reached Lee's poems so well as when I heard him read them.) Both
these accounts cut through the ghastly language about 'creative artists'
found now on the pens of journalists and professors of English, of uni-
versity officials and Canada Council executives. Obviously artists make
things (not create them) but if anything great is to be made they do so
by paying attention - by listening and seeing. (This is the trouble with
Irving Layton's poetry.) To repeat: creation is a dangerous word,
because it denies the primacy for art of what is listened to or seen.
The expression of Lee's openness is evident not only in his writings,
but practically in his work as editor. That wonderful English word 'gen-
erosity' (for which there is no German equivalent) penetrated his work
in setting up the Anansi Press and his editing a vast variety of writings.
Whether for good or ill, a tiresome old manic-depressive such as myself
would never have put the writings he cared about into a book if it were
not for Lee's sane encouragement. And he dealt with equally queer
types among the young and the middle-aged, always with that generos-
ity which in human dealings is the mark of openness.
With hesitation I must now turn to Lee's long poems - the hesitation
of my impotence before the proclamations of poetry. What I will say is
 Dennis Lee 367

at a lower level than the essential. There is a great change from Civil Ele-
gies to The Gods and The Death of Harold Ladoo. To compare the rhythm
and form of Civil Elegies with that of The Death of Harold Ladoo is to know
that much more immediately happens in the second poem than in the
first. My comment upon this must be made in the accents of philosophy
(ich kann nicht anders). To put the matter perhaps too simply: existen-
tialism is the teaching that all thought about serious matters belongs to
the suffering of a particular dynamic context; while traditional philoso-
phy taught that thought was capable of lifting that suffering into the
universal. Both teachings require openness, but traditional philosophy
taught that thought was capable of lifting that suffering into the univer-
sal. Both teachings require openness, but traditional philosophy
believed that the truth present in existentialism was only a preparation
for its transcending. It would appear to me that Civil Elegies is written
out of the struggle which makes human beings existentialists, while the
two later poems have somehow raised up the sufferings of the particu-
lar dynamic context. The Death of Harold Ladoo moves back and forth
with the fluidity of music, from 'the dynamic context' of a particular
friend's particular death to the statements of self and other-ness, love
and hate, living and dying. Never does the particular dissolve into the
merely general, nor does the universal flatten out into abstractions.
Because the later poems are more universal, they are more immediate.
Cadence is more upon the page. This is not meant paradoxically in any
sense. Immediacy and universality require each other. Even at the end
when Mozart writes that 'the ice is around my soul' he is still able to
receive and imitate that which includes even that ice. It is dangerous
and indeed pompous to try to state what is universal in the Iliad, Las
Meninas, the clarinet concerto, or King Lear* but to say that there is
nothing such present in them is just the modern denial of the procla-
mation which is the work of art. Certainly the truth of existentialism is
included in them all, but it is also transcended in them all. The beauti-
ful is the image of the Good, and this includes the truth of existential-
ism because the perfectly beautiful has been crucified.
It is easier to write of Savage Fields for the simple reason that Lee has
written about it so lucidly himself. ('Reading Savage Fields Canadian
Journal of Social and Political Theory, Spring 1979.) Lee spells out there as

I can do no other (Luther).

Homer's Iliad, Velasquez's Las Meninas. Mozart's clarinet concerto, and Shakespeare's
King Lear were Grant's favourite poem, painting, piece of music, and play respectively.
368 Reviews and Essays

in a finely honed legal document what he was doing in the book. It is

therefore unnecessary to speak of its surface ambiguities when this has
been done so lucidly by its author. Anyway, when at the height of his
own enunciation of Beautiful Losers Lee comes to the point where
Cohen drops away from what he might have reached, it becomes quite
clear why Lee calls his book 'an essay in literature and cosmology.' Nev-
ertheless, let me end where I started with the relation of poetry and phi-
losophy. At the end of Savage Fields Lee writes: 'Thinking proceeds by
objectivity and mastering what is to be thought.' He asks: 'What form of
thought can arise which does not re-embody the crisis it is analyzing?'
The first statement is clearly true of our modern destiny. The second
must drive anybody who asks it not only to what may be in the future
but also to thinking of what was before the modern paradigm. The fact
of this great change can be seen in Kant's statement that 'reason' is
higher than 'understanding'; while Plato meant by 'the ideas' that
'understanding' is higher than 'reason.' I am not so foolish as to sug-
gest that in the very midst of the modern fate we should try to avoid it
by simply returning to ways of thought, the criticism of which was in the
very substance of our fate. What I am saying is that as one looks at the
height of modern philosophy in Heidegger or the height of art in the
works of Celine, one must see the grandeur, the truth and suffering in
both. To overcome those ravages (which are oneself) one must look for
sustenance to times when poetry and philosophy had not been ravaged
in this way. In God's name I do not will Lee to become a scholar of
poetry or philosophy: but rather to live in the midst of these ravages,
and to try to re-collect what those proclamations were. To do so is not
to become simply a useful scholar or an amusing entertainer, but to
take upon oneself the mystery of things. Lee, of course, has done much
of this. He is a highly educated human being. But Savage Fields says to
me that he must do more, because the milk of the joy of eternity must
be more substantially present, if the ravages of fate are to be looked on,
and one is not to be turned to stone. Perhaps it is not possible for the
modern poet to reclaim poetry's power from the honey of the past. The
ambiguity that makes Celine the poet of European modernity (in his
last books about war) is that the light of eternity is not absent, even for
him. On the other hand, who can rest in Celine's proclamations of the
word? Celine and Heidegger both must be known as inadequate if
there is to be any real proclamation. In the apogee of technological sci-
ence the attention necessary for re-collecting and detrivializing can
only be a fearful and consummate act. As an older friend watches Lee
at the height of his powers, one cannot help wondering what we will
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 369

owe to him in this re-collecting and detrivializing. Luckily it is nobody's

business but his.

LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE
(LOUIS-FERDINAND DESTOUCHES)
(1894-1961)

Celine, a French doctor and writer, wrote two important novels, Journey to the
End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan, in the 1930s. However,
he also wrote a number of violently anti-Semitic diatribes. The French Left con-
sidered him a collaborator and, fearing execution after the defeat of the Nazis,
Celine fad France. He Tuas imprisoned after the war but later acquitted of collab-
oration. In the 1970s a friend had lent Grant his copies of Celine's war trilogy,
and Grant was immediately and permanently enraptured by Celine's imagina-
tion. Although he took much pleasure from these books and did much to establish
a following for the French writer among Canadian academics, he abhorred
Celine's politics.

Celine is a mystery, just to me in the same way that Heidegger is a mystery. Both
so great £ yet both tied to the criminality of National Socialism. When Celine
says 'Europe died at Stalingrad,' well, I am quite willing for Europe to die if it is
at Stalingrad under these auspices. But nevertheless they both see so much.
- George Grant to William Christian, 7 January 1981

I have got engrossed in writing something about S. Weil, but I find it very slow,
but my heart will be easier when I get back to that darling bastard Celine.
-George Grant to William Christian, 8 January 1985

Celine: Art and Politics (1983)

(O saisons, 6 chateaux,
Qiielle dme est sans defauts?)'

George Grant, 'Celine: Art and Politics,' Quern's Q_uarlerly, vol. 90, no. 3 (Autumn 1983):
801-13. Used with permission.
O seasons! O castles! / What soul is without its faults? (Arthur Rimbaud. 1854-91, a pio-
neer of the symbolist movement in French literature).
370 Reviews and Essays

English-speaking people may find it difficult to recognize that Martin

Heidegger, the leading philosopher of this Western era, and Louis Fer-
dinand Celine (1894—1961), its greatest literary artist, were both acqui-
escent (at the least) towards the National Socialist regime in Germany.
I do not make this claim for Celine because of his two famous novels of
the 1930s Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan, but
because of his three books about his wanderings around Germany dur-
ing its collapse in 1944—5, Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon. The first
purpose of this article is to state that this trilogy is one of the great mas-
terpieces of Western art and the greatest literary masterpiece of this
era. It would be more prudent to flatter this age which worships 'indi-
viduality' and confine the claim to my 'personal' opinion. Aesthetics
would be a 'subjectivist' way of looking at the matter. But let's leave
these clever difficulties aside for the moment.
Such homage to Celine appears necessary since in the present liter-
ary scene in the English-speaking world his works have been shunted
aside because of his anti-Jewish pamphlets of the 1930s and his passive
acceptance of the German occupation of Paris in the 1940s. The con-
temporary way of writing about him is generally the following: here is a
writer whose two main novels in the 1930s were stylistically immensely
influential, and for these he will be remembered; but in the later 1930s
he degenerated into mad and vicious polemical writing and collabo-
rated with the Nazis. He will remain in the history of literature for those
two remarkable early novels, but his later writings are not worth our
attention. Some go much farther than this 'benign neglect,' and these
are not only the French polemicists of the Left, who continue their ven-
detta even when Celine is no longer alive to be shot. For example, in
March 1983 John Bayley, the Warton professor of English at Oxford
University, could write: 'When a worthless or odious self happens to
predominate (Celine, Montherlant,* William Burroughs^) it is the
defects themselves which skill must concentrate and carry to the limit
and beyond.'1 As this is not a theological writing, I leave aside the firm
prohibition against saying about another human being that he or she is
worthless. It has been traditionally affirmed that it is proper to judge
the actions of others, but never themselves. If one did not know the
propensity of eager professors of literature to learn by writing and not

Henri Montherlant (1896-1972), French playwright

William Burro
Burroughs (1914-97), American novelist, author of the controversial Naked
7,imr/z(1959).
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 371

by reading, one might simply leave the answer to this statement as ' tolle,
lege? The answer to such attacks can only be in the reading and above
all the reading of this last trilogy. To all the contempt that has sur-
rounded Celine the central answer is just to say, 'Read.'
To say this, however, is not to deny that questions arise if one reads
Celine with any knowledge of his life. In light of all the nonsense that
has been written about him and in the light of his greatness, it is neces-
sary to proceed carefully in the formulation of the question. At its most
simple, the question might be: How can one be enraptured by the art of
somebody who wrote anti-Jewish pamphlets in the thirties? But this is
not the best formulation. Dostoevski's dislike of the Jews does not stand
in the way of being enraptured by his novels. To go farther with the for-
mulation: the present writing is not a life of Celine and therefore I can-
not go into the details of the three pamphlets at issue. The one that
appears to me the most distorting - L'Ecole des Cadavres — is about the
approach of the War of 1939. It is quite beyond the limits of discourse
acceptable in a constitutional regime. Even if Celine's plea for peace at
all costs between Germany and France was sensible, even if he was cor-
rect that the Jews were in favour of war between the two nations, even if
he could not be expected to predict what crimes the National Socialists
would come to before they were through, it is nevertheless wrong to
publish such inflammatory writings against fellow citizens at any time.
It is wrong because constitutional regimes require a certain modera-
tion of discourse between the citizens of the society if they are to exist.
Indeed, the French regime of the time understood this and banned the
book. But lack of political moderation in an artist is not enough to con-
demn him to the extent Celine has been condemned. Degas's painting
has not been excluded from the canon because he was anti-Jewish. At a
much lower level, the absurdities of Shaw's political and philosophical
assertions do not prevent us from laughing at his plays. In an era such
as ours, in which Western thought and tradition lie in ruins, it is not
surprising that artists should be subject to the confusions of the age,
and therefore should be more than usually excused.
The question can be best formulated in a slightly different way.
Celine's judgments of the thirties make suspect for us the actuality we
seem to be given in the trilogy about the fall of Germany. We are forced
to ask as we drink from the chalice of his art whether its ingredients are
not poisoned and therefore not to be commended to our own lips. If in

Take, read (Latin)

372 Reviews and Essays

the 1930s he can write as if the crisis of imperial technological Europe

can be explained primarily in terms of the responsibility of the Jews,
then is his art not marred at its core by simple failure of vision? To put
the matter in the limited terms of my own experience: I am given in the
trilogy the wonderful sense that this is the way things are; this is a mon-
umental chronicle telling the truth about a great event in terms worthy
of Homer. Then that apperception falls away as made suspect by the
remembrance of the particularity and violence of his political judg-
ments of the 1930s. I prefer this formulation of the question to those
that are based on some supposed understanding of the worthlessness
and odiousness of his character. I prefer it to those who say that he
ought to have had better political judgments. It is best to say that the
extremity of some of his earlier writing makes suspect the very sub-
stance of his later art.
In terms of that formulation, it is necessary to discuss (a) Celine's
'madness' and (b) his politics. These two questions are, of course,
closely related. But I will discuss the first one simply in terms of the evi-
dence for it in the trilogy. The second will be discussed in terms of a
knowledge of the details of his life. It may seem tiresome antiquarian-
ism to raise in detail the political questions of half a century ago. How-
ever, it seems important to do so, because of the claims I am making
about Celine's genius. First it is necessary to say something about what
the trilogy consists in as a story.
These three books describe how Celine and his wife Lili and his cat
Bebert struggle through collapsing Germany in their effort to escape to
Denmark. He had reason to want to escape. The French Left were bay-
ing for his blood. To put it violently but accurately: the plagiarizer of
Heidegger was calling for his execution. The journey takes place while
the Russian armies get closer and closer, and while the American and
British bombers flatten and reflatten the cities. Roosevelt's uncondi-
tional surrender is in full swing. Europe is being demolished by the two
great continental empires with the help of the British. Celine's chroni-
cle is of the collapse of that Europe and is laid before us with prodigality.
From that last sentence three points much be expanded. First, it is a
chronicle - a chronicle 'of wasted time.' Celine keeps saying it is a
chronicle, and one must take it that he knew best what he was doing.
Second, it is a chronicle of great events. A great subject is necessary but
not sufficient for a serious work of art, as the novels of Hemingway and

*J.-P. Sartre.
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 373

Mailer tell us negatively. I do not know whether Aristotle is correct in

saying that war is coeval with humanity. But up to this point it has been.
Therefore it has been a central subject of art. In our era war has been
particularly prevalent because of technology, and has taken new forms
because of technology. What distinguishes our civilization from all pre-
vious ones is the science which issues in the conquest of human and
nonhuman nature. Nuclear science may scare us out of certain wars
(who knows?) but in the meantime modern technological science has
led both to a great increase in war and a great increase in its intensity.
Celine chose for his last masterpiece technological war. (He died the
day that Rigadoon was completed.) Third, it is a chronicle told with
prodigality.
I must pause to say carefully what I mean by 'prodigality,' because its
presence in Celine is central to this tribute. For us it must be a pregnant
word, for it is used in the English translation of a parable in divine rev-
elation. The shorter Oxford English Dictionary says that it means lav-
ishiiess to the point of waste. Therefore, the word may not seem
appropriate to great art. Who would dare say that there is waste in
Shakespeare, Mozart, or Raphael? But what other word will do for this
essential quality which seems common to the great artists? 'Profligacy'
is the word for the vice, and the distinction therefore implies that prod-
igality is not of necessity vicious. 'Profuseness' means the ability to pour
forth. But it sounds ridiculous to say that Shakespeare or Mozart was
profuse. Indeed, the use of the word in the translation of Christ's para-
ble points to its meaning in the present connection. The prodigality of
the son is related to the particular joy in the father's welcome. An anal-
ogy may also be taken from nature. In nature there seems to be an
extravagant waste that would not have been the case if a sensible
human being had made it. It seems that all the very great artists share in
this mysterious lavishness. This appears not only in the fact that a gate-
keeper in Shakespeare is on the stage for a moment, and yet is utterly
realized. It is shown also in the range of the great artists. Mozart can
achieve the seemingly utterly separated worlds of Figaro and the G
minor quintet. It is this prodigality which above all raises Celine's art to
a different level from that of Proust or Joyce, James or Lawrence. The

Of the novelists Marcel Proust, fames Joyce, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence, Grant
had a particular love for James, whose work he discovered while at Oxford after the war.
'What [Henryjames] has done for me above anything else is that by his tremendous pes-
simism, he has shown one that to whatever depths one sinks one is not as he so often
describes his characters as "a man without an alternative." One cannot in fact for what-
374 Reviews and Essays

chronicle is spread out before us - ruined soldiers, refugees, collabora-

tionists, SS leaders, dying women, the animals, etc., etc., talking and
running, cheating and dying, loving and fearing, defecating every-
where from Petain on down. About the magic of the art in which the
dance of this prodigality is achieved - well, it is magic, and I cannot
speak of it here and perhaps not at all.
What about Celine's 'madness?' I do not mean by madness here that
divine frenzy which Plato tells us is necessary to the greatest poets. I am
the last person to say that Celine did not possess that 'mania.' But those
who write of Celine's madness do not mean that. They mean paranoia
as the OED defines it: 'chronic mental unsoundness characterized by
delusions and hallucinations.' When people speak of his madness they
mean some unsoundness which makes him distort reality in his art. Is
his art corrupted by such distortion, as indeed much art has been? In
such art reality is not laid before us so that we can take it to heart; what
is laid before us are the compulsive fantasies of the writer as if they were
the truth.
Two preliminary remarks are necessary before I proceed to the ques-
tion. First, the old cliche: 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean
you aren't being persecuted.' To repeat, throughout the 1940s and 50s
the Left in France called for his blood. When he was writing these books
he had been allowed back into France, after 'solitary' in Denmark. He
had been cleared of any collaboration by a French military court. How-
ever, the Left continued its excoriations of contempt. His death was
kept quiet till after the funeral because it was feared his funeral would
be broken up. When he came back from the Soviet Union in the 30s he
had spoken of 'commissars with asses like archbishops,' and the Left
had not forgiven him. Secondly, hatred is present in all his books. He
had grown up in the lower reaches of the small bourgeoisie; in that class
which was trying not to be proletarianized, never having enough to eat
and always having to toady in order to stay out of destitution. He

ever reasons do what Milly Theale did in the Wings of the Dove, that is, turn one's face to
the wall. However much one may believe one is beyond the grace of the love of God,
that is a mere romantic conception and one can never escape from hope. Anyway read
him right away. Read the great novels The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl and then
read the great short stories like the Beast in the Jungle and The Altar of the Dead. They are
of such greatness.' George Grant to Alice Boissonneau, Oxford, 1946, Selected Letters, ed.
William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996).
Marshall Henri Philippe Petain (1856-1951), head of France's Vichy government dur-
ing the German occupation in the Second World War War.
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 375

describes it in the account of his youth in Death on the Installment Plan. 'If
you haven't been through that you'll never know what obsessive hatred
smells like ... the hatred that goes all through your guts all the way to
your heart.' But are hatreds a mark of madness? Aren't all of us, other
than the saints, full of hates of one kind or another? To deny that most
human beings hate is to confuse the immediate facts with the highest
end, and to deny that that end is supernatural.
To return to the centre of the question: Is reality distorted in the tril-
ogy by Celine's madness? Those who think so fail to grasp what the
book is. Celine is telling the story of himself and his wife and his cat
wandering around a bomb-wrecked Germany. He is there as a story-
teller, and he is there acting in the story. It is not some novel where the
writer lives 'standpointless' outside the book. Celine's art may give the
impression of madness because he is able to hold inwardness and out-
wardness together in a marvellous way. Celine is always present in the
1950s as well as in the 1940s. For example, the first hundred and twenty-
five pages of the trilogy are about his enforced retirement in the sub-
urbs in the 1950s. The old storyteller emerges as he goes on about the
tricks of his publisher, the cold, the anguish of his patients, the nuts
who come out to interview him, the memories of the hole in Denmark,
the good sense of his wife, and always the animals. It culminates, when
he has a return of malaria, in a vision of Charon taking people to the
underworld. Then when the storyteller is there in all his concreteness
the 1950s drop away and we come to Celine in the midst of Germany in
its collapse. The old dying genius is there to tell us the story as we move
into the chronicle itself. Or again, often he will drop away from some
intense moment when Lili and he are nearly getting their throats cut,
back into the France where he is now recollecting. The intensity of the
chronicle overwhelms the storyteller and he comes back to the
moment of telling. Near the very middle of the trilogy he once calls Lili
by her full name, Lucette, as if her courage in the story brings back his
love for her at the time of recollection. When at the height of the high-
est of the three books, Rigadoon, he is in the midst of the destruction of
Hanover by the flying fortresses, we are present in his hallucinations
when he is hit by a brick. But is this madness? How can one better tell
what it is like to be in the midst of saturation bombing? When one says
this, it is well to remember that English-speaking people have done
most of the bombing in this era, not so much suffered it.
Celine's inwardness is not madness, but the art whereby he is
present in the books both as storyteller and participant. Old men like
376 Reviews and Essays

to tell stories about the events of their lives. In comparison with the
unity of the inward and outward in Celine's writing, Proust seems a
Trollope of the Faubourgs and Joyce's Mollie Bloom a literary device.
This is not somebody who would qualify as the idea of what psychiatric
social workers want us to become. But it is worth remembering that the
society which lives under this ideal is not one which seems to produce
great works of art.
If I were to use a colloquial title for this writing, it would be Up Yours,
Matthew Arnold. To see life steadily and see it whole is an admonition
that is likely to be self-defeating for poets. Yet those who call Celine
mad would have liked to have lived by it. To repeat: it is reported that
the saints in prayer can at moments touch that love wherein 'the tears,
the agony, the bloody sweat' can be loved. But for the rest of us, all too
often the attempt to see it steadily is a method for not seeing it whole.
Only a well-heeled bourgeois whose country and class were the most
powerful in the world could have united the two, outside the supernat-
ural love. Those who devote themselves to practice have to see life
steadily to the extent that they have to get on with the job. It means,
however, that they have to cut themselves off from trying to see life
whole. This is why poets and philosophers know they are always in con-
flict with the workings of society, however much they must try to hide
this fact. They must try to see life whole, but parts of that whole can
hardly leave them steady. Celine was a dedicated doctor who at the
height of his poetic art wrote of technological war with incredible ten-
derness. A steady story of what he had lived through would have been a
distortion and corruption.
The definition of poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquility' must
be given greater respect than the 'steadiness' business, because it
comes from a greater poet' than Arnold. After Celine had been cleared
by the court, he had enough immediate tranquility to write his epic
poem. Recollection certainly required tranquility at that basic level. But
why should the storyteller in the suburbs pretend in his recollecting
that he is some jolly old reconciled gent who has put on a mantle
deemed appropriate by those who feed our academic fodder machines
in cosy universities? Indeed, it appears to me that those who write of
Celine's madness and how it vitiates his art are in fact trying to put aside

* Matthew Arnold (1822-88), British poet and social critic who rejected vulgarity in favour
of culture and 'sweetness and light.'
^William Wordsworth (1770-1850), leading British romantic poet.
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 377

the truth he is telling us. They often seem to go further and wish for
him to be mad so that what is told herein can be emasculated. This is of
course closely related to the option that he must be mad, for how else
could he have held such political opinions?
What then of Celine's politics? I must first state that it seems to me
unimportant to take seriously the political judgments of most of us.
They are caused mainly by necessity and chance - occasionally a little
by good. They are better understood in terms of comedy than by behav-
ioral science. And this still remains the case despite our extreme politi-
cization in the technological age. It certainly applies to Celine's
politics. They are only to be described because they have stood in the
way of the proper recognition of his art - particularly in the English-
speaking world. It is useful therefore to look at his politics - albeit they
have no contemporary significance and are an historical curiosity.
Celine's first political principle was that war between France and Ger-
many should be avoided at all costs. As a youngster he had been thrown
into the carnage of the 1914 War, and had been badly wounded. He
wanted the Europeans to stop killing each other before they were swal-
lowed up by the alien empires which surrounded them. His account of
the European situation was very close to Heidegger's statement of 1935:
'This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its
own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on
the one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of
view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological
frenzy.'- Celine wanted to save Europe (for him above all France) from
tearing itself up, and from invasion by the two continental empires
which wait in the east and west. It must be remembered that some
English Conservatives shared this opinion. One of Chamberlain's rea-
sons for the Munich pact was to keep both America and Russia out of
Europe. Clearly by 1939 a majority of English followed Churchill's
acceptance of Canning's principle of bringing in the new world to
redress the balance of the old. This was not, however, possible in the
same way for French traditionalists, because they did not speak the
same language as the Americans. Bismarck had said, a century before,
that the chief fact of European politics was that the United States spoke
English. Celine was no lover of the church or of the army. But he was a
French traditionalist, in that his loyalty was given to the small-bourgeois
life of his country. As war approached, Celine thought that the Jews and
the English were trying to push the French into war with the Germans,
and that this should be avoided at all costs.
378 Reviews and Essays

Added to this essentially European pacifism must be the fact that

Celine was close to another dictum of Heidegger's, namely that capital-
ism and communism are both predicates of the subject technology. As
a slum doctor he had come to hate capitalists who were the beneficia-
ries of slum misery. He had gone officially to the U.S.S.R. as the author
of the early novels which had been taken by the communists as great
documents of the proletariat. He came back to write an indictment of
the system. He said of the regime in the early 30s that only three things
worked: the police, propaganda, and the army. He had been at Ford in
Detroit and had not admired that edition of technology. Although he
did not discuss the meaning of industrialism in any systematic way, he
clearly was not a Utopian about its results for human beings, and
thought it was not likely to be improved, whether it was organized by
'the Left' or by 'the Right.'
When the war came in 1939, Celine automatically tried to volunteer,
and when turned down as unfit became a doctor on a ship which was
torpedoed by the Germans. He saw no reason not to live in Paris under
the Occupation. He did not have much to do with the Germans
although they tried to court him as a great writer. In 1940 he already
said the Germans were going to lose the war, and after the end of the
Stalin-Hitler pact in 1941 with the invasion of Russia, he knew his life
was more and more at risk as the Left became identified with the Resis-
tance. With the invasion of Europe from the west in 1944 he knew he
had to fly. In thinking of these French questions, English-speaking peo-
ple do well to remember a remark of de Gaulle's in 1944. He had just
had a tumultuous reception at Nantes where two months before Petain
had had an equally tumultuous reception. De Gaulle pointed out that
the same people cheered at both. It is also well to remember that more
French were murdered by the French after the Allied invasion than
during the years of Petain. The Left were ferocious in revenge during
1944-6.
Yet something more must be said about Celine's attitude to Euro-
pean politics. In the 1950s he often uses the phrase 'Europe ended at
Stalingrad.' It may be true that the defeat of the German armies meant
that Europe would be henceforth under the control of the eastern and
western continental empires. It may be true that something essential to
Europe would be lost when its civilization came to be shaped by the
world of the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. But it is clearly an implication of the
statement 'Europe ended at Stalingrad' that the price of it not ending
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 379

would have been a large German empire in Russia, and a slave empire
at that. Whatever may be said against Soviet society, Russia as a German
colony is surely as appalling as the Soviet conquest of Europe. It was of
course a German argument that as the English and the French had
world empires it was only fair that the Germans should not be excluded
from empire. Moreover they maintained that the English and the
French could only hold on to theirs if they let the Germans take part in
the common European imperialism. At a wider level it was claimed that
either in 1914 or 1939 the Americans and the English, the Germans and
the French should have come together to set up an international sys-
tem which would have been incomparably more secure than the
present one. Something like this seems to lie behind Celine's opinion
that this era marks the collapse of the 'white' races.
What seems so extraordinarily absent in this diagnosis is any recogni-
tion that in recent centuries the European races have been the
dynamic imperialists. European civilization had brought forth that uni-
versalizing and homogenizing science which issues in the conquest of
human and nonhuman nature. In Heidegger's dictum about Europe
lying in the pincers of two continental empires dominated by techno-
logical frenzy, he forgets that Europe itself had brought into being that
two-headed monster of technological science and dynamic imperial-
ism. To speak of Germany alone, one simply has to remember its theo-
retical contributions to that frenzy- relativity and quantum mechanics.
The U.S.A. obviously, and the U.S.S.R. through marxism, are but epig-
onal products of that Europe. After all, Marx said his thought was the
union of English political economy, French revolutionary politics, and
German philosophy. The chief influence on the American Constitu-
tion was the thought of Locke, which helped to loose technological
frenzy. At the core of Celine's loyalties is a love of particularity- in part
the particularity of the nation against the universalizing and homoge-
nizing power of the cosmopolis. Yet the natural and moral sciences
which would destroy particularity were themselves a creation of that
Europe which he wished to save. Celine's politics is an abstraction from
that science the consequences of which he describes so brilliantly in
detail. But failure of understanding at this point hardly puts the great-
ness of his art in question.
A more pressing political question is the relation of Celine's art to his
writings about the Jews in the 1930s. How seriously can one take the art
of somebody who could put such emphasis on the Jews in explaining
380 Reviews and Essays

the crisis of imperial technological Europe? To speak of that question

requires one to contemplate the mystery of the Jews. I use the word
'mystery' to distinguish it from 'problem.' It is out of the question ever
to speak of the Jewish 'problem' because the answer to problems are
solutions and we must have before us always in any such discussion the
remembrance of that atrocious crime 'the final solution.' To mysteries
there are no solutions; one simply lives in their presence with reverence
and good judgment.
The mystery of the Jews is the continuation of this people through
different civilizations in which the push to integration has been
brought against them in vain. It is not necessary to speak here of the
survival of the Jews in civilizations dominated by ancient paganism, by
Christianity, or by Islam. We are here concerned with modern anti-
Semitism. Indeed, my change of language from anti-Judaism to anti-
Semitism illustrates the new situation. The traditional Christian anti-
Judaism changed into an intellectual anti-Semitism, based on national-
ism and later, worse, on race. This change happened at the same time
that the Jews were pouring into Western Europe from the east. For
obvious and seemingly sensible reasons, many Jews welcomed the polit-
ical world of the Enlightenment and wanted to share in it. The politics
of the Enlightenment expressed above all the belief that we were mov-
ing towards a universal society of free and equal human beings, in
which differences about the eternal would be matters of opinion and
therefore unimportant politically. Many Jews welcomed such beliefs as
helpful to them, compared to those of the older Christian world.
Indeed, many Jews became secularized, and believed the universal
creed of that secularism - whether capitalist or communist progress.
But insofar as many Jews remained Jews, that integration could not be
absolute. Believing themselves a nation chosen of God, the Jews kept
their distinctiveness and their interconnectedness across national
boundaries. That is, they came into the universalist world of technology
with strong exclusivist characteristics.
This new but partial integration of the Jews produced the new anti-
Semitism in a secularized Europe. To many European intellectuals, the
Jews appeared to want the benefits of the homogenized society while
maintaining as final their loyalty to their particularist community. On
these grounds there had been anti-Judaism from Voltaire, and his posi-
tion was restated a century later by Marx. Worst, believing that religious
belief was an illusion and yet wanting to attack the growing presence of
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 381

the Jews, many intellectuals made the appalling step of basing their
attack on race, and so claimed to be giving it a 'scientific' underpin-
ning. The consequences of this secularism can be seen in the fact that
the great logician Frege wrote racialist pamphlets against the Jews. At
the other end of the scale, many of those who remained Christians
thought that the acceptance of the Enlightenment by intellectual Jews
was just a method whereby they could attempt to weaken religious
belief other than their own. It was believed that Jews wanted all faiths to
be weak save their own.
Beyond intellectual anti-Semitism lay nationalist anti-Semitism. The
Jews often appeared to take the side of internationalism and cosmo-
politanism in the life of their own countries, and so to hurt the inter-
ests of those countries. They could be disliked at one and the same
time as supporters of international revolution and as central to inter-
national capitalism. Both were cosmopolitan positions. This national-
ist anti-Semitism led into the deeper and more sustained levels of
populist anti-Semitism. This penetrated those classes particularly at
risk under the new regimes. The very solidarity of the Jewish commu-
nity helped them to be successful in the impersonal world of the new
technological states. It allowed them to be tough in the economic
world, because they were more freed from the straining loneliness
which was consequent on the impersonal world of mass civilization.
They could treat the public world without thinking of the conse-
quences of destroying it, because they had a nation other than the
nation which the public world manifested. They could retreat into
their national and religious community in a way that Christians could
not. The intellectual attack on Christianity was the more immediately
devastating to simple people because Christianity was not a nationalist
religion. People who were deprived of their particularism in techno-
logical society came to resent the Jews because their particularism had
so obviously not been demolished. The economically weak in the mass
cities saw their pasts taken away by finance capitalism. They came to
see the Jews as the masters and creators of a world in which they could
not function. Just read Hitler's account of his agony of loneliness in
the gaudy decay of pre-World War I Vienna, and his identification of
the Jews with that society, to understand an immediate cause of the
immense calamity.

F.L.G. Frege (1848-1925), influential German logician.

382 Reviews and Essays

Celine's dislike of the Jews was of this populist variety. (It is hard,
therefore, to know whether to call it anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism.)
He was to say that the Stavisky scandal in France and his work as a doc-
tor for the League of Nations brought it to life in his writings. It was,
however, essentially populist. What made it of such consequence for
the future recognition of his art was that it came to the surface at a
time when terrible events were brewing in Germany. Celine's intensity
of desire that there should be no repeat of war between Germany and
France led to his politicized writing, based on an inadequate premiss -
namely, that the overriding cause of the European crisis in the 1930s
was the Jews. He certainly must be credited with a major mistake in
political judgment and a great lack of moderation in writing about it.
Beyond this, he must certainly also be seen as somebody whose life and
art is packed full of the modern ideas that had come to flower in the
last centuries and which swept over Europe at the time of its collapse as
a civilization. But this last has been a state common to all Western art
and thought in this terrible era. Its consequences have, of course, been
worse for philosophy than for art. Celine at the best of times was, both
for good and for ill, a singularly unphilosophical being. He had all the
contempt of the deprived for theories. This was good in that the imme-
diacy of his art is not thinned by general ideas; it was for ill in that the
absence of philosophy left him open to the 'spirits' of the age.
Celine often spoke of his 'disaster' - the period of his life from 1930
to 1950. He seems to have meant that period when he wrote of the
public world, and the consequences he paid for it in persecution.
Indubitably that long disaster is something to be regretted in the life of
a great artist. In that disaster what is marred for us in Celine is his judg-
ment, albeit at a time when such failure was widespread. By the time
Celine is writing this trilogy in the 1950s he is all political passion
spent. His hopes have been burnt out of him by prison and persecu-
tion, by poverty and by age. The splendour of his art lays before us
Europe's collapse. Indeed, the very high splendour of his art is some-
how related to the fact that his hopes have been burnt out. In this
sense the question about this writing can be answered negatively. The
greatness of his art is not corrupted by the follies of his 'disaster.' His
trilogy is not a poisoned chalice. We drink from it the truth of the
human condition.3

A financial scandal in 1933-4 involving the French premier, Serge Stavisky, that led to
his resignation.
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine 383

NOTES

1 Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 1983, 255.

2 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 31.
3 W.L. Grant had much to do with starting the Queen's Quarterly ninety years
ago. This article is, therefore, dedicated to my father, as memory.
This page intentionally left blank
 PartS
Technology and Modernity
This page intentionally left blank
 THE GOOD OR VALUES?

Grant often discovered theoretical problems when faced with practical situa-
tions. He came to understand that the language of values was not just another
way of talking about the Good; it was a way of talking that facilitated the
progress of technology and increasingly foreclosed the possibility of understand-
ing what had been meant by Good in the past. He delivered this talk to a meet-
ing of social workers.

Value and Technology (1964)

In turning to our society as it is, I do not want simply to run down the
list of the most important social problems which arise at the present
state of technological advance and proceed to discuss the problems of
value created by these new technological conditions.

These are all questions about each of which important papers could
be written. But you all know the facts of our society as well as I do, and
you all know incomparably better than I what special questions these
situations raise for your profession. It would be boring if I simply
repeated the platitudinous descriptions of the new sociology; it would
be impertinent if I told you how to do your work. In fact I do not want
to talk about values but about value itself, because the crucial thing to
see about our society is not simply that technology changes social val-
ues, but that it makes problematic the very idea of value itself.

What is it, then, about the age of progress which does not merely
change values, but makes the very idea of value problematic to large
numbers and particularly to those who are most explicitly part of the

George Grant, 'Value and Technology,' in Conference Proceedings: 'Welfare Services in a

Changing Technology' (Ottawa.: Canadian Conference on Social Welfare 1964), 21-9.
388 Technology and Modernity

age of progress. To give the most general answer to this question: the
cause lies in the fact that there is an almost complete separation for
many between their freedom and the myths. So to speak may seem to
you highly general and rather pedantic, but this is the central condition
of most modern human beings and therefore it is a fact with which your
profession deals in its daily work. What then is myth? It is an account of
existence in this totality which reveals to most men their own mode of
being in the world. Myths are the way that systems of meaning are given
to most human beings. And it is from systems of meaning that we make
judgments about what is valuable. Why is meaning given to most
human beings in myth? The greatest of all philosophers answered this
in saying that myths exist 'to enchant the soul.' Why is it necessary for
the soul to be enchanted?: so that it may be led to the true purposes of
human existence. The myths are not, then, the truth about human life,
they are the enchanting images by which most men are led to appre-
hend some purpose in their existence. They are the chief way that most
of us apprehend the beauty of the world. Being what we are - neither
gods nor beasts but human beings - we need to be enchanted into the
good way. Let me make clear that in speaking about myths, I am not
here discussing how we move through myth to truth. Truth is certainly
more than myth. For example, in my opinion Christianity is more than
myth, it is the truth. But it is certainly mythical in the sense that it has
revealed to countless millions their own mode of being to the world.
But insofar as I must be able to judge its relation to competing myths,
for example in the modern world the myth of progress, I must be able
to know it as myth, but more than myth. On the other hand, myths are
not altogether other than truth, because they are more than particular
tales. They carry with them the note of universality. The story of Oedi-
pus tells us something universal in which we can live. Yet again it is not
so universal as the story of the Bo tree or beyond that of the cross,
because they tell us of what is even more universal about human exist-
ence, about enlightenment and about dereliction.
By freedom is meant the modern account of self-consciousness: that
is, of the self as absolute. This is, indeed, the very heart of what modern
history has been and is - the belief that man's essence is his freedom.

Tradition has it that the Buddha was sitting under the Bo tree when he achieved enlight-
enment.
 The Good or Values? 389

The negative aspect of this authentic and absolute freedom must be

that every meaning, every purpose, every value has to come before the
court of that freedom and is under the judgment of that sovereignty.
We conceive ourselves to be the source of ourselves, the source of our
own order. But it is the very mark of any myth to speak of those things
which transcend the individual, to speak of an order of which the indi-
vidual is a part, but which does not originate in his freedom. The heart
of any myth is to tell us of that which our freedom does not create but
by which it is judged. This is, then, what I mean by that separation
between freedom and myth. As modern people come to believe them-
selves to be the absolute source of themselves, all systems of order and
meaning which appear to human beings as myth become other to
them, and so in the very act of their sovereignty they experience the
world as empty of meaning.
This affirmation that man's essence is his freedom is not something
experienced by the few, but by more and more in our technological
and mobile society. More and more find themselves separated from
the myths in and through which most human beings found point and
purpose. The last great myth which held masses in the modern world
and still holds many was the myth of progress. It was the last by defini-
tion because it depended on the assertion of absolute human sover-
eignty. But once one has asserted that absolute freedom one has
excluded oneself from myth. This process of alienation (to use the jar-
gon) will affect great numbers of people in the universal and homoge-
neous state - from those at the pinnacles of authority in the
bureaucracy down through the varying echelons of technical skill. The
liberals who led in this definition of man as freedom acted in earlier
generations as if those in the centres of power would be free, but that
the ordering myths would continue among those in the sticks who
were too foolish to see through them. But in our day and generation in
North America we live in a world where emancipation from the myths
touches every corner of our civilization and where imitation of the
sophisticated is preached over the television and through the maga-
zine in every home. We have achieved equality in our society at least at
the point where we massively can liberate people from all sense of
meaning. It takes a high degree of stubbornness in our society not to
try arid seem a sophisticate.
Now I have no doubt that this alienation of people's freedom from
the myths and the ensuing sense of existence as arbitrary and contin-
390 Technology and Modernity

gent will be the chief phenomenon of our highly automated society.

Therefore, an increasing number of these among whom you practise
your profession will find themselves confronted with this situation. This
separation will appear most clearly in new forms of what this genera-
tion called 'mental illness.' As Plato makes clear, mental illness must
above all be defined socially, and therefore this new condition of sepa-
ration will produce new forms of mental illness. It is very difficult to cat-
alogue them because they are so new. But certainly that unclear and
catch-all-term of modern psychiatry - schizophrenia - will be applied to
them. As my experience is rather concentrated on bureaucrats of the
second or third orders of power, let me speak of some of the phenom-
ena I notice there.

But now our bureaucrats are increasingly of a new kind. For one reason
or another, they have accepted the entirely modern and believe them-
selves to be the source of their own freedom. And the more sophisti-
cated these people are, the less they see themselves as part of a common
moral world and the more they see themselves as over against the world,
dealing with it as otherness, as a series of objects which they move
around as a means of proving to themselves that they are free. To put it
crudely, many of the products of these new bureaucracies seem less and
less able to imagine or to conceive that the objects with which they deal
are in fact human beings who exist in the same way that they do. This
atmosphere of solipsism will of course never be absolute, but insofar
as it exists, political activity becomes an assertion of self and sexual
activity a completion of one's own fantasies. This removal of the self
from the shared world of moral striving, this vision of everything other
as outside oneself, is in my Platonic book the source of many forms
of madness. This is not to say that many of these bureaucrats of which
I speak will be locked up; it is much more likely that they will do the
locking up.

But what, however, could upset us is something more inner than these,
this widespread separation from meaning (but as soon as we say that we
must remember that the Roman Empire kept itself in being for centu-
 The Good or Values? 391

ries after any system of meaning had disappeared from its ruling
classes).

There will be a hectic search for pseudo-myths in our society as also

there will be profound attempts to live truly in ancient myths. Insofar as
the modern craze for art is more than 'interior decoration,' it is obvi-
ously a search for myth, pseudo or otherwise.
One extraordinary aspect of this separation between myth and free-
dom is that where the political liturgy is full of appeals to the individual
in his freedom to make society, the scientific analysis of society and
individuals is centred in around the principle of a complete determin-
ism. You all know the language of modern sociology and psychology so
I do not have to describe it. Man is, then, conceived from the widest
extreme. We assert 'scientifically' that human conduct can be abso-
lutely predicted and therefore controlled; as individuals we believe our-
selves to be free in the most absolute sense, as the makers of our own
selves and our own values. And let me say about this extraordinary pic-
ture of man that the cause of meaninglessness lies more in the assertion
of freedom than of determinism. It is sometimes asserted that modern
social science is a danger to traditional morality and religion because it
claims to be able to predict and control individual and collective behav-
iour. But it does not seem to me that this side of the modern picture of
man has the highest danger. Rather, it is the other side, which asserts
that man's essence is his freedom, that we are the cause of ourselves,
which is much more the source of meaninglessness. It is certainly a
slight misinterpretation to be told that one's conduct can be inter-
preted by analogies from the rats; but it does not destroy one like
believing one is absolute, that is, that one is God. To put the point in
another way, using the language of freedom we talk of people as 'selves'
rather than 'souls.' But in changing the vocabulary we have changed
how we consider ourselves. As Leo Strauss has said: 'The self is obvi-
ously a descendant of the soul; i.e., it is not the soul. The soul may be
responsible for its being good or bad but it is not responsible for its
being a soul; of the self on the other hand it is not certain whether it is
not a self by virtue of its own effort.' And it is this absolute sovereignty
of the self in its own effort which puts on people a burden which should
not be put and which leads people to utter despair. To take a very sim-
392 Technology and Modernity

pie illustration, Mrs Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique. The book
says a lot of true things about women in North America. But it is written
as a sermon to encourage people to make their own lives and so puts a
terrible burden of compulsion on women to be absolutely sovereign in
their freedom.
Indeed, it can be said that this separation between freedom and myth
expresses itself most profoundly in our very use of the word 'value.'

Any neophyte in social science can tell one these days that it is self-
evident that we must distinguish between facts and values. What is
meant by this distinction between facts and values? What is meant by
this distinction is that there is a world of facts which we do not make but
which we discover and about which we can make objective judgements.
On the other hand, there are values which are made by human beings,
which are not part of the objective world and about which our judg-
ments are subjective, that is, relative to us. Man in his freedom makes
values - they are what he does with the facts. To illustrate: those who
make this distinction would say that when I state that Bessie Touzel'
weighs 135 pounds. I am stating a fact; but when I state that she is a
noble human being I am simply expressing my value preferences. But
this use of the word values is a symptom of the very split between free-
dom and myth of which I have been speaking. Value is seen as some-
thing external to the facts; something which is created by man and not
given in the world. This is to deny that the world apart from us is valu-
able, and to deny that the world is in itself good is the heart of blas-
phemy. In this sense the crisis of value in technology is nowhere better
seen than in the social sciences which make the fact-value distinction.
For in that very distinction is the denial that the world is in itself valu-
able. This is to leave the individual naked and alone in the dreadful
pressure of time. No wonder ours is the most dynamic society on earth
when we believe we have to make the meaning of our own lives. No

Betty Friedan (1921- ), American feminist, author of the landmark book The Feminine
Mystique (1963).
Bessie Touzel (1904-97), executive director of the Ontario Welfare Council, 1953-65,
vice-president for North America of the International Federation of Social Workers
(1956-8).
 The Good or Values? 393

wonder the most explicitly modern men alternate between the rage to
live and despair about their contingency.

To think that would be itself an example of the very separation that I

am talking about. It would be to say that we could make the world
meaningful, if we would only use our freedom to make it so. 'Just think
right' or 'Be responsible' are not adequate mottos for social order. The
worst of this nonsense is to be found in those psychiatric dramas with
which the corporations flood the networks. All problems depend on
some madness in our heads, and therefore we do not have to think
about the nature of society. This is the cheapest form of idealism. No,
what I am saying is that indeed the separation between myth and free-
dom originates in the way that modern men have thought of them-
selves for several centuries, but also that this way of looking at ourselves
is made true for most of us by the immediate situations we encounter in
the mass society. In the long run this view of man has created the situa-
tion; but in the short run it is the situations which give people this view
of man. In our work and our play, in our dealings with people and with
the environment, more and more of us find ourselves in more and
more situations in which our freedom is the source of our existence.

A few years ago there was a kick on in which people talked about the
dreadful results of conformity in our society.

This is indeed the chief cause of the ambiguity with which some look
at the age of progress (and I use ambiguity here literally). On the one
hand, one sees every day of one's life the convenience of that age - its
production of commodities which ease this life and enable masses to live
in the world with comfort and even affluence. On the other hand, one
sees that at the heart of society there arises this meaninglessness - this
sense of the atrophy of the soul. There are those who place the difficul-
ties of our age in more external questions. Can we bring the underde-
veloped nations to be like us quickly enough to prevent the population
explosion? Can we stop some nutty government from using the Bomb?
394 Technology and Modernity

etc., etc. If these external difficulties can be met then all will be well. But
I think this is to miss the real ambiguity of our age: what is the quality of
being in the age of progress? It is here above all in North America that
that ambiguity most clearly arises, because we have first realized what in
general everybody else is going to become. If you like to ride the crest
of the wave of the future, you're on it in Chicago or Toronto.

THE CIVILIZATION OF TECHNIQUE

Jacques Ellul was a French Protestant sociologist whose work Grant encountered
in the mid-1960s. Until that point, Grant thought that, because of Marx, Mar-
cuse, and Kojeve, he had made some progress in understanding the coming into
being of modern technological society. However, Ellul's writings illuminated for
Grant the character of the society that had come into being. For this, Grant grate-
fully acknowledged Ellul's works on the subject of technology, but he did not gen-
erally admire Ellul's later writings.

The Technological Society (1966)

Two books by Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society and Propaganda, are
the most important of all required reading for anybody who wants to
understand what is occurring in the 'advanced' societies during our
era. Modesty may require the words 'in my opinion' in the previous sen-
tence, but I hesitate to qualify such praise of greatness by the subjective.
Ellul is a professor of the history of law and of social theory at the Uni-
versity of Bordeaux. The Technological Society (called in French, La Tech-
nique ou I'enjeu du siecle) was published in France in 1954. It was
translated very ably (by John Wilkinson) and published by Knopf in
New York in 1964. Propagandas was published in France in 1962 and in
the U.S.A. in 1965. The Technological Society lays down the broad lines
within which Ellul understands modern society; Propaganda analyses
one of the dominant forces shaping that society. For that reason this
review will be concerned only with The Technological Society, although

George Grant, review of Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (New York: Knopf 1964),
Canadian Dimension, vol. 3, nos. 3, 4 (March-April, May-June 1966), 59-60.
 The Civilization of Technique 395

Propaganda is more closely written than the former book and greatly
illumines it.
The thesis of great writing cannot be encapsuled into a few smooth
phrases. The New Statesman or The New York Reviezv of Books to the con-
trary, the purpose of reviewing is not to show that the reviewer is clev-
erer than the author. Ellul's book is of 450 pages and all of it needs to
be read. The point of this review is to persuade others to read this won-
derful book, not to summarize it.
Ellul defines technique as 'the totality of methods rationally arrived
at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in
every field of human activity.'1 Technique is not limited to particular
examples, of which the most massively obvious is machines. Ellul
includes within technique the sum of all rational methods used in any
society, e.g., the police, propaganda, modern education, etc. He anal-
yses (pp. 13-19) the leading definitions of technique found in mod-
ern sociological writing and shows that they are all too limited in that
they do not take full account of the facts. He describes the character
of technique in our society, how it has become both geographically
and qualitatively universal, how it is self-augmenting and autonomous.
To quote: 'Self augmentation can be formulated in two laws: (1) In a
given civilization, technical progress is irreversible. (2) Technical
progress tends to act, not according to an arithmetic, but according to
a geometric progression' (p. 89). In my opinion, the most important
part of the book is his account of how technique has become autono-
mous. What he means by autonomous is that technique is not limited
by anything external to itself. It is not limited by any goals beyond
itself. It is autonomous with respect to the areas of economics and pol-
itics - indeed, throughout society as a whole. It is the creator of its
own morality. 'It was long claimed that technique was neutral. Today
this is no longer a useful distinction. The power and autonomy of
technique are so well secured that it, in its turn, has become the judge
of what is moral, the creator of a new morality. Thus, it plays the role
of creator of a new civilization as well. This morality, internal to tech-
nique, is assured of not having to suffer from technique. In any case,
in respect to traditional morality, technique affirms itself as an inde-
pendent power. Man alone is subject, it would seem, to moral judg-
ment. We no longer live in that primitive epoch in which things were
good or bad in themselves. Technique in itself is neither, and can
therefore do what it will. It is truly autonomous' (p. 134). From other
writings it is clear that Ellul is a Christian, and in some of the wittiest
396 Technology and Modernity

asides of the book he speaks of how the dominant religious institu-

tions and thinkers of today have beautifully adapted themselves to be
servants of the new authority. Nowhere is Ellul clearer than in dealing
with the great liberal chestnut that technique in itself is never wrong
but only the use men make of it (p. 96 et seq.).
The main bulk of the book is devoted to descriptions of how tech-
nique operates in the economic system, of its influence in the state
and on the character of the state, and a long section on human tech-
niques. One could wish that this last section was required reading for
every behaviourial scientist and particularly for those psychologists
whose work is dominated by the assumptions of B.F. Skinner at Har-
vard. His final section on 'Technical Anesthesia' and on 'Integration
of the Instincts and of the Spiritual' are particularly masterful. He
ends his book with the following clear paragraph: 'But what good is it
to pose questions of motives? Of why? All that must be the work of
some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress. The atti-
tude of the scientists, at any rate, is clear. Technique exists because it
is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other
answer is superfluous.'
Ellul has been accused of pessimism and determinism, generally by
liberals. They assert against him the following two dogmas of their
faith: (a) that all will turn out well in the end and (b) that man's
essence is his freedom, or in other words that man has the ability to
make the world as he chooses. It is not my business here to point out
the difficulty of asserting both these propositions at once. Ellul has evi-
dently felt called upon to answer these charges which he does in his
usually sparse way in the Foreword to the Revised American edition.
'The probable development I describe might be forestalled by the
emergence of new phenomena. I give examples — widely different, and
deliberately so - of possible disturbing phenomena':

1. If a general war breaks out, and if there are any survivors, the destruc-
tion will be so enormous, and the conditions of survival so different, that
a technological society will no longer exist.
2. If an increasing number of people become fully aware of the threat
the technological world poses to man's personal and spiritual life, and if
they determine to assert their freedom by upsetting the course of this evo-
lution, my forecast will be invalidated.
3. If God decides to intervene, man's freedom may be saved by a
change in the direction of history or in the nature of man.
 The Civilization of Technique 397

But in sociological analysis these possibilities cannot be considered.

The last two lie outside the field of sociology, and confront us with an
upheaval so vast that its consequences cannot be assessed. Sociological
analysis does not permit consideration of these possibilities. In addition,
the first two possibilities offer no analyzable facts on which to base any
attempt at projection. They have no place in an inquiry into facts; I can-
not deny that they may occur, but I cannot rationally take them into
account. I am in the position of a physician who must diagnose a dis-
ease and guess its probably course, but who recognizes that God may
work a miracle, that the patient may have an unexpected constitutional
reaction, or that the patient - suffering from tuberculosis - may die
unexpectedly of a heart attack. The reader must always keep in mind the
implicit presupposition that if man does not pull himself together and
assert himself (or if some other unpredictable but decisive phenome-
non does not intervene), then things will go the way I describe' (xxviii-
xxix).

This answer incorporates in my opinion a valid methodology for any

sociologist and has the added virtue of wit. Ellul's writing is informed
by that quality which has belonged to the best writing about any sub-
ject, a quality for which the French have been notable in the West - a
desire to see things as they are, founded on that belief which was most
succinctly stated in the words 'the truth shall make you free.' He wants
men to understand that 'the further the technological mechanism
develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are
subjected to artificial technical necessities. The artificial necessity of
technique is not less harsh and implacable for being much less obvi-
ously menacing than natural necessity' (p. 429). He does not write of
necessity to scare men, but to make them free. I certainly am freer for
having read this book.
My main criticism of the book concerns the section on 'Historical
Development.' He fails to answer satisfactorily the historical question
which seems to me essential: Why did the civilization of technique
first arise in Western Europe? In this section Ellul gives a useful analy-
sis of the immediate factors present in Europe from the sixteenth
century that were favourable to the origin of technological civiliza-
tion. But these causes do not seem to me sufficient to explain the
events. The civilization of modern Europe came out of Western Chris-
tianity. Modern secularism is secularized Christianity and particularly
secularized Protestantism. (One has only to compare the presupposi-
398 Technology and Modernity

tions of Lucretius with those of Bentham or Marx.) To understand

Western Europe, one surely has to understand the difference between
the Christianity that came to be there after the tenth century, with its
intense interest in reforming the world, and the older Mediterranean
Christianity. One indeed can see the origins of this difference in the
break between Augustine and the earlier Eastern fathers. What has
come into the tradition between classical philosophy and modern
philosophy is Biblical religion in its Christian form. Nobody has ever
seen this with greater clarity than Hegel in the Phenomenology. To
understand the origins of modern technique one must surely look
more closely than does Ellul at its intimate relation with Biblical
religion.
In no spirit of impudent psychologizing, but simply from his own
words, I would deduce that Ellul's lack of discussion at this point
comes from a highly conscious and noble turning away from philoso-
phy toward a sociological realism. Indeed, his very turning away from
philosophy is surely in part responsible for the greatness of his socio-
logical writing. The danger of attempting philosophy is that one can
be so taken up by the difficulties in knowledge of the whole that one
is overcome by a vertigo which demolishes one's ability to look at the
world with steadiness. This is perhaps the reason why so few human
beings have passed beyond that vertigo to the state where they are
'spectators of all time and all existence.' It must have taken immense
steadiness and courage to have maintained unflinchingly one's gaze
on modernity as Ellul has done. The price of this steadiness may be en
pleine connaissance de cause to limit one's gaze. But why quibble about
historical causes with the great? The answer to historical questions is
not practically important compared to certainty of analysis about the
immediacies of the present. Keats put perfectly my response to this
book: 'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet
swims into his ken.' Not to have read this book is to choose to
remain socially myopic when somebody offers you free the proper
spectacles.

NOTE

1 The page notes are taken from the English edition of the work (London:
Jonathan Cape 1965), xxxiii.
 America: A New World 399

AMERICA: A NEW WORLD

George Grant has, as the author o/Lament for a Nation, a reputation as an

anti-American, and from a political point of view the description is apt. Grant
argued for the importance of minimizing, to the greatest extent possible, Ameri-
can cultural, economic, and political influence over Canadian life. However,
from a philosophical point of view, he acknowledged that the United States was
the spearhead of a dynamic technological modernity that was fated to encompass
the globe. The phrase 'American exceptionalism' suggests that the United States
is a unique society. Grant accepted this view and sought to explain how techno-
logical modernity had risen and was achieving fulfilment in North America.

In Defence of North America (1969)

To exist as a North American is an amazing and enthralling fate. As in

every historical condition, some not only have to live their fate, but also
to let it come to be thought. What we have built and become in so short
a time calls forth amazement in the face of its novelty, an amazement
which leads to that thinking. Yet the very dynamism of the novelty
enthralls us to inhibit that thinking.
It is not necessary to take sides in the argument between the ancients
and moderns as to what is novelty, to recognize that we live in novelty of
some kind. Western technical achievement has shaped a different civi-
lization from any previous and we North Americans are the most
advanced in that achievement. This achievement is not something sim-
ply external to us, as so many people envision it. It is not merely an
external environment which we make and choose to use as we want — a
playground in which we are able to do more and more, an orchard
where we can always pick variegated fruit. It moulds us in what we are,
not only at the heart of our animality in the propagation and continu-
ance of our species, but in our actions and thought and imaginings. Its
pursuit has become our dominant activity and that dominance fashions
both the public and private realms. Through that achievement we have
become the heartland of the wealthiest and most powerful empire that

George Grant, 'In Defence of North America,' in Technology and Empire. (Toronto:
An an si 1969). Used with permission.
400 Technology and Modernity

has yet been. We can exert our influence over a greater extent of the
globe and take greater tribute of wealth than any previously. Despite
our limitations and miscalculations, we have more compelling means
than any previous for putting the brand of our civilization deeply into
the flesh of others.

Yet those who know themselves to be North Americans know they are
not Europeans. The platitude cannot be too often stated that the
U.S.A. is the only society which has no history (truly its own) from
before the age of progress. English-speaking Canadians, such as myself,
have despised and feared the Americans for the account of freedom in
which their independence was expressed, and have resented that other
traditions of the English-speaking world should have collapsed before
the victory of that spirit; but we are still enfolded with the Americans in
the deep sharing of having crossed the ocean and conquered the new
land. All of us who came made some break in that coming. The break
was not only the giving up of the old and the settled, but the entering
into the majestic continent which could not be ours in the way that the
old had been. It could not be ours in the old way because the making of
it ours did not go back before the beginning of conscious memory. The
roots of some communities in eastern North America go back far in
continuous love for their place, but none of us can be called autochth-
onous, because in all there is some consciousness of making the land
our own. It could not be ours also because the very intractability,
immensity, and extremes of the new land required that its meeting with
mastering Europeans be a battle of subjugation. And after that battle
we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the
new forms of conquest which came with industrialism.
That conquering relation to place has left is mark within us. When
we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But
if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods
of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and
what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the envi-
ronment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the
road to economic mastery.
It may be that all men are at their core the homeless beings. Be that
as it may, Nietzsche has shown that homelessness is the particular mark
of modern nihilism. But we were homeless long before the mobility of
 America: A New World 401

our mobilized technology and the mass nihilism which has been its
accompaniment. If the will to mastery is essential to the modern, our
wills were burnished in that battle with the land. We were made ready
to be leaders of the civilization which was incubating in Europe.

This connection between the English-speaking Protestants and the

new physical and moral sciences is played down by those who point to
the worldliness of thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke, as compared to
the stern account of salvation found among the Calvinists. Such a con-
trast is indeed obvious but misses the nature of the connection. It was
not that the new philosophers were held by the truth of Christianity.
Protestantism was merely a presence in the public world they inhabited
which was more compatible with their espousings than Catholicism.
Rather, the connection was from the side of the Protestants who found
something acceptable in the new ideas so that often they were the
instruments for these ideas in the world, almost without knowing the
results for their faith. At the least, Calvinist Christianity did not provide
a public brake upon the dissemination of the new ideas as did Catholi-
cism and even sometimes Anglicanism. For example, Locke, so impor-
tant an influence on our North American destiny, may well be
interpreted as contemptuous of Christian revelation and even of the-
ism itself. The comfortable self-preservation to which he thought men
directed is hardly compatible with what any Christianity could assert
our highest end to be. Nevertheless, over the centuries it has been Prot-
estants, both authentic and conventional, who have found his political
and epistemological ideas so congenial. One of his great triumphs was
surely that by the marvellous caution and indirectness of his rhetoric
and by some changes of emphasis at the political level he could make
Hobbes's view of nature acceptable to a still pious bourgeoisie. Most of
us do not see how our opinions are gradually changed from what we
think we believe, under the influence of ideas elucidated by others
incomparably deeper and more consistent than ourselves. 'Worldly
asceticism' was to become ever more worldly and less ascetic in the
gradual dissolving of the central Protestant vision. The control of the
passions in Protestantism became more and more concentrated on the
sexual, and on others which might be conducive to sloth, while the pas-
sions of greed and mastery were emancipated from traditional Chris-
tian restraints. Weber was brilliantly right to place Franklin near the
402 Technology and Modernity

centre of his account of English-speaking Protestantism. Incomparably

less philosophic than Locke, Franklin illustrates the influence back
from Protestantism into the ideas of the New World modernity. He may
have had contempt for revelation in his sensual utilitarianism, but the
public virtues he advocates are unthinkable outside a Protestant ethos.
The practical drive of his science beautifully illustrates what has been
quoted from Troeltsch. It takes one quite outside the traditionally
contemplative roots of European science, into the world of Edison and
research grants. In 1968 Billy Graham at the Republican Convention
could in full confidence use Franklin in his thanksgiving for what the
Christian God had done for America.
The fact that such men have so often been the shock troops of the
English-speaking world's mastery of human and non-human nature lay
not simply in the absence of a doctrine of nature into which vacuum
came the Hobbesian account of nature (so that when revelation was
gone all that was left was that account) but also in the positive content
of their extraordinary form of Christianity. The absence of natural the-
ology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the
transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This will had to be
sought and served not through our contemplations but directly
through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that posi-
tion came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeas-
able responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical
freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theo-
logical context. The external world was unimportant and indetermi-
nate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the
soul's ambiguous encounter with the transcendent. What did the body
matter; it was an instrument to be brought into submission so that it
could serve this restless righteousness. Where the ordinary Catholic
might restrain the body within a comparatively ordained tradition of a
liturgy rhythmic in its changes between control and release, the Protes-
tant had solitary responsibility all the time to impose the restraint.
When one contemplates the conquest of nature by technology one
must remember that that conquest had to include our own bodies. Cal-
vinism provided the determined and organized men and women who
could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on non-
human nature, they had first inflicted on themselves.

Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), German historian who wrote on the history of Protestant-
ism and the social teachings of the Christian churches.
 America: A New World 403

Now, when from that primal has come forth what is present before
us; when the victory over the land leaves most of us in metropoleis
where widely spread consumption vies with confusion and squalor;
when the emancipation of greed turns out from its victories on this con-
tinent to feed imperially on the resources of the world; when those
resources cushion an immense majority who think they are free in plu-
ralism, but in fact live in a monistic vulgarity in which nobility and wis-
dom have been exchanged for a pale belief in progress, alternating
with boredom and weariness of spirit; when the disciplined among us
drive to an unlimited technological future, in which technical reason
has become so universal that it has closed down on openness and awe,
questioning and listening; when Protestant subjectivity remains authen-
tic only where it is least appropriate, in the moodiness of our art and
sexuality, and where public religion has become an unimportant litany
of objectified self-righteousness necessary for the more anal of our
managers; one must remember the hope, the stringency, and nobility
of that primal encounter. The land was almost indomitable. The
intense seasons of the continental heartland needed a people who
whatever else were not flaccid. And these people not only forced com-
modities from the land, but built public and private institutions of free-
dom and flexibility and endurance. Even when we fear General Motors
or ridicule our immersion in the means of mobility, we must not forget
that the gasoline engine was a need-filled fate for those who had to live
in such winters and across such distances ...
When Calvinism and the pioneering moment have both gone, that
primal still shapes us. It shapes us above all as the omnipresence of that
practicality which trusts in technology to create the rationalized king-
dom of man. Other men, communists and national socialists, have also
seen that now is the moment when man is at last master of the planet,
but our origins have left us with a driving practical optimism which fit-
ted us to welcome an unlimited modernity. We have had a practical
optimism which had discarded awe and was able to hold back anguish
and so produce those crisp rationalized managers, who are the first
necessity of the kingdom of man. Those uncontemplative, and
unflinching wills, without which technological society cannot exist,
were shaped from the crucible of pioneering Protestant liberalism. And
still among many, secularized Christianity maintains itself in the rheto-
ric of good will and democratic possibilities and in the belief that uni-
versal technical education can be kind etcetera, etcetera. Santayana's
remark that there is a difference between Catholic and Protestant athe-
404 Technology and Modernity

ism applies equally to liberalism; ours is filled with the remnential ech-
oes of Calvinism. Our belief in progress may not be as religiously
defined as that of the marxist, but it has a freedom and flexibility about
it which puts nothing theoretical in the way of our drive towards it (or
in other words, as the clever now say, it is the end of ideology). In short,
our very primal allowed us to give open welcome to the core of the
twentieth century - the unlimited mastery of men by men ...
Indeed, the technological society is not for most North Americans, at
least at the level of consciousness, a 'terra incognita' into which we
must move with hesitation, moderation, and wonder, but a compre-
hended promised land which we have discovered by the use of calculat-
ing reason and which we can ever more completely inherit by the
continued use of calculation. Man has at last come of age in the evolu-
tionary process, has taken his fate into his own hands and is freeing
himself for happiness against the old necessities of hunger and disease
and overwork, and the consequent oppressions and repressions. The
conditions of nature - that 'otherness' - which so long enslaved us,
when they appeared as a series of unknown forces, are now at last
beginning to be understood in their workings so that they can serve our
freedom. The era of our planetary domination dawns; and beyond
that? That this is obviously good can be seen in the fact that we are able
to do what we never could and prevent what we have never before pre-
vented. Existence is easier, freer, and more exciting. We have within
our grasp the conquest of the problem of work-energy; the ability to
keep ourselves functioning well through long spans of life, and above
all the overcoming of old prejudices and the discovery of new experi-
ences, so that we will be able to run our societies with fewer oppressive
authorities and repressive taboos ...
That difficulty is present for us because of the following fact: when we
seek to elucidate the standards of human good (or in contemporary
language 'the values') by which particular techniques can be judged,
we do so within modern ways of thought and belief. But from the very
beginnings of modern thought, the new natural science and the new
moral science developed together in mutual interdependence so that
the fundamental assumptions of each were formulated in the light of
the other. Modern thought is in that sense unified fate for us. The
belief in the mastering knowledge of human and non-human beings
arose together with the very way we conceive our humanity as an
Archimedean freedom outside nature, so that we can creatively will to
shape the world to our values. The decent bureaucrats, the concerned
 America: A New World 405

thinkers, and the thoughtful citizens as much conceive their task as cre-
atively willing to shape their world to their values as do the corporate
despots, the motivations experts, and the manipulative politicians. The
moral discourse of 'values' and 'freedom' is not independent of the will
to technology, but a language fashioned in the same forge together
with the will to technology. To try to think them separately is to move
more deeply into their common origin.
Moreover, when we use this language of'freedom' and 'values' to ask
seriously what substantive 'values' our freedom should create, it is clear
that such values cannot be discovered in 'nature' because in the light of
modern science nature is objectively conceived as indifferent to values.
(Every sophomore who studies philosophy in the English-speaking
world is able to disprove 'the naturalistic fallacy,' namely that state-
ments about what ought to be cannot be inferred solely from state-
ments about what is). Where, then, does our freedom to create values
find its content? When that belief in freedom expresses itself seriously
(that is, politically and not simply as a doctrine of individual fulfil-
ment), the content of man's freedom becomes the actualizing of free-
dom for all men. The purpose of action becomes the building of the
universal and homogeneous state - the society in which all men are free
and equal and increasingly able to realize their concrete individuality.
Indeed, this is the governing goal of ethical striving, as much in the
modernizing East as in the West. Despite the continuing power in
North America of the right of individuals to highly comfortable and
dominating self-preservation through the control of property, and in
the communist bloc the continuing exaltation of the general will
against all individual and national rights, the rival empires agree in
their public testimonies as to what is the goal of human striving.
Such a goal of moral striving is (it must be repeated) inextricably
bound up with the pursuit of those sciences which issue in the mastery
of human and non-human nature. The drive to the overcoming of
chance which has been the motive force behind the developers of mod-
ern technique did not come to be accidentally, as a clever way of deal-
ing with the external world, but as one part of a way of thought about
the whole and what is worth doing in it. At the same time the goal of
freedom was formulated within the light of this potential overcoming
of chance. Today this unity between the overcoming and the goal is
increasingly actualized in the situations of the contemporary world. As
we push towards the goal we envisage, our need of technology for its
realization becomes ever more pressing. If all men are to become free
406 Technology and Modernity

and equal within the enormous institutions necessary to technology,

then the overcoming of chance must be more and more rigorously pur-
sued and applied - particularly that overcoming of chance among
human beings which we expect through the development of the mod-
ern social sciences.
The difficulty, then, of those who seek substantive values by which to
judge particular techniques is that they must generally think of such
values within the massive assumptions of modern thought. Indeed,
even to think 'values' at all is to be within such assumptions. But the
goal of modern moral striving - the building of free and equal human
beings - leads inevitably back to a trust in the expansion of that very
technology we are attempting to judge. The unfolding of modern soci-
ety has not only required the criticism of all older standards of human
excellence, but has also at its heart that trust in the overcoming of
chance which leads us. back to judge every human situation as being
solvable in terms of technology. As moderns we have no standards by
which to judge particular techniques, except standards welling up with
our faith in technical expansion. To describe this situation as a diffi-
culty implies that it is no inevitable historicist predicament. It is to say
that its overcoming could only be achieved by living in the full light of
its presence.
Indeed, the situation of liberalism, in which it is increasingly difficult
for our freedom to have any content by which to judge techniques
except in their own terms, is present in all advanced industrial coun-
tries. But it is particularly pressing for us because our tradition of liber-
alism was moulded from practicality. Because the encounter of the
land with the Protestants was the primal for us, we never inherited
much that was at the heart of Western Europe. This is not to express
the foolish position that we are a species of Europeans-minus. It is clear
that in our existing here we have become something which is more
than European - something which by their lack of it Europeans find
difficult to understand. Be that as it may, it is also clear that the very
nature of the primal for us meant that we did not bring with us from
Europe the tradition of contemplation. To say contemplation 'tout
court' is to speak as if we lacked some activity which the Ford Founda-
tion could make good by proper grants to the proper organizations. To
say philosophy rather than contemplation might be to identify what is
absent for us with an academic study which is pursued here under that
name. Nevertheless, it may perhaps be said negatively that what has
been absent for us is the affirmation of a possible apprehension of the
 Technology as Warning 407

world beyond that as a field of objects considered as pragmata - an

apprehension present not only in its height as 'theory' but as the
undergirding of our loves and friendships, of our arts and reverences,
and indeed as the setting for our dealing with the objects of the human
and non-human world. Perhaps we are lacking the recognition that our
response to the whole should not most deeply be that of doing, nor
even that of terror and anguish, but that of wondering or marvelling at
what is, being amazed or astonished by it, or perhaps best, in a dis-
carded English usage, admiring it; and that such a stance, as beyond all
bargains and conveniences, is the only source from which purposes
may be manifest to us for our necessary calculating ...
We live, then, in the most realized technological society which has yet
been; one which is, moreover, the chief imperial centre from which
technique is spread around the world. It might seem that because we
are destined so to be, we might also be the people best able to compre-
hend what it is to be so. Because we are first and most fully there, the
need might seem to press upon us to try to know where we are in this
new found land which is so obviously a 'terra incognita.' Yet the very
substance of our existing which has made us the leaders in technique
stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend
technique from beyond its own dynamism.

TECHNOLOGY AS WARNING

An invitation to speak to a body such as the Royal Society of Canada, of which

Grant was a member, was an honour he took seriously. He chose to speak to this
gathering of the most distinguished scientists in the country of the 'monster' over
whose coming-into-beingthey were presiding. Heidegger's influence is apparent in
the central distinction between knowing and making that Grant develops here.

Knowing and Making (1975)

Different civilizations and different periods within the same civilization

have different paradigms of knowledge. The principle of each of these
George Grant, 'Knowing and Making,' Transactions of the. Royal Society of Canada, Series
IV. xii (1975): 59-67. Delivered to the Royal Society, June 1974.
408 Technology and Modernity

paradigms has been the relation between an aspiration of human

thought and the effective conditions for its realization. In our present
civilization our paradigm is what we call 'natural science.' One does not
have to be a physicist to know that physics has been the exemplary and
the most remarkable intellectual achievement of our era. Therefore, it
is appropriate in discussing 'the frontiers and limitations of knowledge'
to start from a discussion of that paradigm. Indeed, at a meeting of the
Royal Society such a discussion is particularly appropriate. Insofar as
institutions are influential in such subtle matters as definitions of
knowledge, our parent institution has for three centuries been closely
associated with that paradigm.
Yet those of us who are not natural scientists face immediately an
ambiguity concerning the propriety of our taking part in any such dis-
cussion. One side of that ambiguity arises because of the absurd preten-
sion of speaking of what such scientific activity is, when one does not
pursue that activity. When I read Heisenberg's beautiful books about
the works of physicists, I read them in the same way I read Mozart's
beautiful letters about his art. The reading of either will not make me a
physicist or a musician. Nor would such reading encourage me to make
grandiose general statements concerning what a great physicist or great
musician is about. Rather, they should teach one that there are realms
of knowing and making which one does not enter but of which it is
good to be aware, and which one might better understand were there
but world enough and time for long years of preparatory study. One is
now aware of them only in the sense of touching the fringes of their
garments by means of parables from one's own thoughts as part of the
same world. To put the matter crudely: if I had authority over university
curricula, I would eliminate all courses on the philosophy of science
taught by people who were not primarily engaged in a particular sci-
ence. Still greater foolishness is to write as if one wished to reform or
even replace such science. General discussions about the sciences can
only be usefully carried on by those who have given long years to the
serious and successful pursuit of some modern science.
On the other hand, the outsider is driven back to the discussion of
the sciences because of the intimate relation of interdependence
between the modern sciences and the arts. No special knowledge is

Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), one of the leading theoretical physicists of the twentieth
century and the formulator of a version of quantum theory known as matrix mechanics;
awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932.
 Technology as Warning 409

required to be aware of that fact. In seeking an illustration of this fact,

it is misleading to take the example of modern science and the arts of
war, because many men and women hope that the arts of war will one
day cease to exist. Rather, one should take one's illustration from an art
such as medicine, because that is an art which it is hard to see disap-
pearing. In the case of medicine, the co-penetration of the arts and sci-
ences in our era is obvious. We are moving on this continent to a society
which is best described as the mental health state - that is, a regime in
which massive coercion is above all exercised by the practioners of the
art of medicine and its satellite arts. The ability of the medical profes-
sion to carry out this work of coercion will depend on its dependence
on what we call 'the health sciences,' which themselves depend on
more fundamental sciences.
This is the ambiguity concerning the propriety of non-scientists
speaking about modern science. A true, if incomplete, definition of jus-
tice is minding one's own business. Clearly modern science is not my
business. On the other hand, because of the intimate co-penetration of
the sciences and the arts, it has become the business of all of us. We are
going to be patients (and I use the word in its fullest sense) of the men-
tal health state. And patients must try to maintain some ability to speak
of their patienthood. It is therefore correct to say that those of us who
are non-scientists are called to speak about science because of its evi-
dent co-penetration with the arts. But in doing so we must be continu-
ally conscious that we are not speaking out of the heart and greatness of
modern science.
Therefore, I would say that the question of 'the frontiers and limita-
tions of knowledge' presents itself to me more properly as the question
'the frontiers and limitations of making.' Not only is that formulation
more practically pressing, but it does not hide the fact that our present
paradigm of knowledge is one in which the traditional separation
between science and making is increasingly overcome. To put the mat-
ter personally: people often say to me contemptuously, 'Why do you
sound so fearful of modern science?' This always irritates me, because I
am sure that the most comprehensive vision is not that of tragedy, and
therefore I do not think that Oedipus was right to stab out his eyes. I am
a rationalist. Insofar as science is concerned with telling us the truth
about what is, how can it be anything but good? What makes one afraid
is what can be made and unmade - the making of tyrannies, the mak-
ing of monsters, the unmaking of species, etc.
The uniqueness of the present co-penetration of the arts and sciences
410 Technology and Modernity

can be seen by comparison with how they were once conceived in the
West. Our word 'art' comes from the Latin 'ars' which the Romans took
as their equivalent for the Greek word 'techne' One way of trying to fig-
ure out what the Greeks meant by 'techne is that it was a kind of 'poie-
sis' and 'poiesis' has generally been translated into English as 'making.'
But this does not help much, because making is one of those elementary
English words, which in its simplicity can hide from us what the Greeks
meant by 'poiesis.' We get closer to 'techne when we translate 'poiesis'
by the literal sense of the word production - a leading forth. 'Poeisis'
was a leading forth, and 'techne one kind of leading forth. The fish
hawk in the Atlantic storm would be for the Greeks a poiesis - a veritable
production - as much as this desk has been led forth. The difference is
that the chief cause of the osprey's production is not external to itself;
while the chief cause of the desk's production is external to itself, in an
artist, in this case a carpenter. Techne (call it if you will art) is the lead-
ing forth of something which requires the work of human beings. But
led forth and from where? To where? To use this language about the
present, we can make desks and microphones; so far we can only
unmake the production of the osprey by our use of chemicals which
unmake its reproduction. It remains to be seen whether we can remake
ospreys when they cease to reproduce themselves.
Let me make two comments about the older way of speaking. First,
there is in it none of that snobbish difference between the fine arts and
the ordinary arts which has so debased bourgeois culture. For example,
music just means the techne of the muses. In this language, then,
Mozart is an inspired artist, but not an artist in a difference sense from
a mechanic, a doctor, a politician, or a carpenter. Politics is the royal
art, not only because it has to control all the other arts, but because its
purpose is to lead into existence the highest thing here below - a good
society.
For the Greeks, art was indeed one kind of knowledge. As Plato said,
for something to qualify as an art the producer had to be able to give
his reasons for what he was doing. The artist had to know how to lead
things forth, not simply be an tinkerer. Nearly everybody in Canada
knows the difference between the garage man who tinkers with one's
car and the mechanic who can make it run. But although art was a kind
of knowledge, it was strictly distinguished from theoretical knowledge -
that 'theoretikeepisteme which through Latin was the origin of our
word 'science.' They were above all distinguished because they were
concerned with different entities. Art was concerned with what might
 Technology as Warning 411

or might not be - in that language, with entities that were accidentally.

Science was concerned with what must be - in that language, with enti-
ties that were necessarily. Let me say that as a modern person I find it
baffling to think exactly what was being thought in that distinction. Be
that as it may, what is of concern at this point is that the distinction led
to firm separation between the arts and the sciences.
Clearly what is given us in our era from that originating language
has been quite transformed as regards science, art, and their relation.
The words may be similar but what comes forth from those words is
quite different. A great transformation which we sometimes call the
scientific society or the industrial society or the technological society,
and which has made Western ways world-wide, is nowhere more her-
alded than in the changed meaning of 'science' and 'art.' I can speak
here, among learned people, of the osprey as poiesis, as production,
but it is clearly a forgotten, an archaic, language. This is not how we
now take production.
In this province the government has established colleges of applied
arts and technology. The division which takes place here, so that the
Latin 'ars' is made distinct from the Greek 'techne' mirrors what has
occurred in our civilization. The arts have been divided into those
which are co-penetrated with science (and called technologies) and
those arts to which this has not happened. In the word 'technology' the
two Greek words are put together, so that we have literally 'systematic
speeches about the arts.' But in this fact we have something new in the
world, those forms of making that are capable of being penetrated at
their very heart by the discoveries of modern science.
In the Oxford dictionary, technology is defined as 'the scientific
study of the practical arts.' In the seventeenth century, the word 'tech-
nology' was coined in English to describe the scientific study of the
mechanical arts - assuming in that coining the long European division
between the mechanical and the liberal. But still this definition will not
do because of an ambiguity in the idea 'scientific study.' The word 'sci-
ence' is used in two ways, to speak either about any systematic body of
knowledge, or about the particular paradigm from which I started, par-
ticularly modern physics. The general usage is more often found in
French or German than in English. For example, in my business the
French speak of 'les sciences religieuses.' It tells us something of our
place in modern history that this general use of science is rare in
English. The statement that technology is the scientific study of the
practical arts is, then, obscuring. It is obscuring because it hides the fact
412 Technology and Modernity

that something new has arisen in the world. It does not make clear that
technologies arise not from a scientific study of the arts which leaves
them systematized but essentially unchanged, but rather by the pene-
tration of the arts by discoveries of science which changes those arts in
their very essence.
What has changed is that the giving of reasons in the new way of mak-
ing now comes from modern science. To take a negative example: Pro-
fessor Northrop Frye has led the way in a new scientific study of
literature. In the literal sense of the word, one could call his work tech-
nology. But clearly his art of criticism does not turn that art into what
we now mean by technology. His science does not penetrate the art so
as to transform it. His science is that of Linnaeus, rather than that of
Newton or Planck. The art of criticism is not transformed at its very
heart as is the art of medicine by the science of chemistry. To illustrate
that transformation again: during the sixties many of us were required,
whether for good or ill, to hear a lot of rock music. Clearly science had
touched that art through the application of amplifiers, etc. But such
application had not transformed the very essence of the art of the
muses, the leading forth of the beautiful into existence. Quantum phys-
ics has transformed the production of energy at its very heart. Technol-
ogy comes to us as something new in the world, a production in which
science and art are co-penetrated.
I used to think that the French and German distinction between the
words 'technique' and 'technology' kept something that was lost in the
English use of the single word 'technology.' It maintained the distinc-
tion between the particular means of making (technique) and the stud-
ies from which they came (technology). I have now changed my mind
because the single word 'technology' brings out that the very horizons
of making have been transformed by the discoveries of modern sci-
ence. Technology may be a strange combination of Greek words, but it
expresses what is occurring in the world. I repeat: that this word should
have been achieved by the English-speakers also brings out the particu-
lar formative aspiration to making which has characterized our tradi-
tion of science. It is worth remarking that a man very enamoured of
that English tradition - P.B. Medawar' - should call science 'The Art of

Max Planck (1858-1947), German originator of quantum theory, received a Nobel Prize
for physics in 1918.
Sir Peter Medawar (1915-87), British zoologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for physi-
ology or medicine, 1960.
 Technology as Warning 413

the Soluble.' Indeed, we can well say that in our world only those arts
which can be turned into technologies can publicly be taken seriously.
Fortunately it is not my job to say what this has done to the other arts.
They have above all been turned into entertainment, decoration, and
expressions of subjective fantasy.
I do not need to stress the more obvious side of the interdepen-
dence. The new inventions in these very arts make possible new discov-
eries in science.
These new arts inevitably call forth thought. Because they are new,
this thought is above all questioning. Among the manifold questions,
clearly the most important is: What is it in modern mathematical phys-
ics which brought into the world a new relation between making and
knowing? What are we told about the whole, from the fact that the new
algebraic equations have lent themselves so extraordinarily to giving us
knowledge of a kind which has placed the race in a new relation of con-
trol towards the world of objects - including the race itself as an object.
We often speak loosely of the distinction between theoretical and
applied science. 'Applied' means originally 'folded toward.' But the
question I am asking about modern physics is not asked as if the word
'applied' has to be added 'ab extra'^ to the word physics. What is it in
the very discoveries of physics that makes the world available to us in a
new way, so that the very nature of the knowledge leads us to new tech-
nologies? That this new availability is a fact is just a platitude; what it is
has never been completely fathomed. To put the matter in another
way: in the first sentences I said that the principles of different para-
digms of knowledge in different civilizations were to be found in the
relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective con-
ditions for its realization. What is the central aspiration of modern
physics and what are the effective conditions for the realization of that
aspiration? What is it in the relation between that aspiration and those
conditions which leads to these new arts? That is what I mean by this
central question.
Let me repeat again as strongly as I can that it would be presumptu-
ous folly for anyone not engaged in modern mathematical physics to
believe that he could get very far with this question. It may very well be
said: Why does such a broad question need to be thought about? Have
not physicists and mathematicians enough to do for the progress of

P.B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble, (London: Methuen 1967).

Frorn the outside (Latin).
414 Technology and Modernity

their own study? Does not the modern world present us with enough
tasks that need to be worked at, without a kind of thought which would
necessarily involve a retreat from those tasks? Anyway, is it not already
clear enough to any practising scientist what is given in such words as
'experiment,' mathematics,' 'reasoning,' 'objects,' 'research' (the art
of the soluble), so that the relation between the sciences and the tech-
nologies is clear enough, and what matters is to work for the further
progress of the sciences and technologies?
In answer one might say that from the very origins of modern phys-
ics and mathematics a certain new relation between knowing and
making was already given. But what is given in any origin may become
hidden from those to whom it is given, and may only become clear in
the actualization of what was only potential in those origins. In the last
decades we have started to live in the full noon of this actualization, so
that what was given in our modern origins can now be thought more
clearly.
There is, moreover, a great practical incentive to such thinking -
namely the contemporary crisis concerning what should be made. The
crisis arises because of the invention of a vast new power of making,
and because of the absence of any clear knowledge of what it is good to
make or unmake. Both the positive and negative sides of this situation
are directly related to the achievements of modern scientists. As the
scientists' discoveries have made possible the new arts, so also the para-
digmatic authority of their account of nature has put in radical ques-
tion the original Western teaching concerning the frontier and
limitations of making. The story of what has happened concerning the
negative side has been told so many times that I will not spell it out in
detail again. Suffice it to say: for the ancients 'good' meant what some-
thing was fitted for. Our modern science does not understand nature
in these ideological terms. Knowledge of good cannot be derived
from knowledge of nature as objects. When the word 'good' was cas-
trated by being cut off from our knowledge of nature, the word 'value'
took its place, as something we added to nature. But now in our time
the emptiness of that substitute becomes apparent. The only great
achievement of the philosophical movement we call existentialism was
to expose that emptiness by showing that the language of 'values' has
nothing to do with knowledge.
The situation is often described by saying that morality has been put
in question. Such a description may be true, but it is misleading unless
it includes what men mean by morality. Morality was above all con-
 Technology as Warning 415

cerned with the frontiers and limitations of making. What was meant by
traditional 'moral' philosophy or theology was the attempt to gain
knowledge of the proper hierarchy among the arts. As a modern, I was
for many years bewildered in reading Plato to find that the vast body of
his writings, which seem to be speaking of what we call 'morality,' was
taken up with detailed discussion of techne- the arts. For example,
what is the relation of the art of medicine to the art of politics? How is
the good life related to the arts of music, mathematics, mechanics, trag-
edy, etc, etc. What emerges from this greatest ancient authority is a
careful account of the arts in which the frontiers and limitations of
each art is claimed to be known in subordination or superordination to
all the other arts. It is claimed that some people can come to a detailed
knowledge of the frontiers and limitations of making.
The fact that that claim to knowledge has little surviving authority for
the modern world can be seen with startling clarity in Mr Justice Black-
mun's decision about abortion in the Supreme Court of the United
States. He states as self-evident that the Hippocratic oath comes from a
mythical and irrelevant past and therefore has no claim today on any
doctor. The Hippocratic oath is a statement concerning the frontiers
and limitations of one art. It is considered mythical and irrelevant by
the Justice because he believes that the account of the universe on
which it is based has been shown to be untrue and irrelevant by the dis-
coveries of modern science. Even if one were to grant some substance
to the Justice's shallow arguments, the question still remains: Where do
we find any positive knowledge in the modern world that can give fron-
tiers to the technological imperative - that imperative which was
expressed so lucidly by Robert Oppenheimer when he said: 'If some-
thing is sweet, you have to go ahead with it.'
The new technologies are taking us into realms of making which
occur as it were necessarily, that is, almost outside consideration of
human good. The thrust of these arts is now turned to the making of
our own species. Men cannot 'escape imitating nature as they under-
stand nature.' This making of our species is thought of as subsumed
under the ascent of man in evolution. But when making is directed
towards our own species, it becomes clear that one man's making may
be another man's unmaking. For example, what is one to think of the
making in the programmes of behaviour modification now so usual in
American prisons and asylums? Or again, I read recently the new med-
ical euphemism for the unmaking of the undesired aged - 'suicide by
proxy.' At my age one casts an interested eye on such phrases. Having
416 Technology and Modernity

solved the problem of the undesired members of the species at their

beginnings, the medical profession turns to the problem of the undes-
ired ones at the end. So that this problem can by solved within the lan-
guage of freedom, the solution is to be called 'suicide by proxy.'
Fortunately, the monsters have proliferated in the last years. The
word 'monster' originally came from 'monere,' a warning. In this
sense, the evidence pointing to the possibility of the decay of the
oceans is a monster. Indeed, the ancient doctrine was that these warn-
ings were evidence of the beneficence of nature. It was beneficent in
that it sent up warnings. But there are clearly profound differences
among us as to what occurrences deserve the title 'monster.' I would
make one distinction between types of monster. On the one hand,
there are those warnings which nearly all of us would see as monstrous,
and which we should be able to deal with technologically, if there be
sufficient collective sanity - for example, the decay of the oceans. If we
don't do something about them there will be visible disasters. But there
are monsters of another kind. For example, we may soon be able to
make a race of human slaves, whether by cloning or behaviour modifi-
cation, who could be made to be content to be slaves and to live for the
sake of their masters. If one called such making monstrous, one could
not do so in the name of any visible disaster. Such a seemingly con-
tented tyranny might go on ad infmitum. Nor if we say this is monstrous
can we say it could be solved by technology. It would be monstrous to
make such a race of happy slaves, it is something we must know in
advance should not be done, whether we can do it technologically or
not. What is the knowledge which allows us to judge that in advance? A
modern account of the arts which could claim knowledge of their
proper frontiers and limitation would require taking into account mon-
sters not only of the first type, but of the second.
This is the chief reason why I am frightened by P.B. Medawar's
account of research as 'the art of the soluble.' My central objection is to
his use of the word 'soluble.' The archetypally monstrous event of this
century was called by its perpetrators 'the final solution.' They thought
they could solve what they called 'the Jewish question' because it
seemed possible to dissolve the Jews. So we can solve the problem of the
criminal by dissolving the imprisoned by behaviour modification. In
North America we have recently decided to solve the population prob-
lem by the widespread dissolving of unborn members of our species.
To speak of research as the 'art of the soluble' only seems harmless pro-
gressive rhetoric, if one assumes that the soluble is unambiguous con-
 Technology as Ontology 417

cerning good and evil. But in our era it is just 'the soluble' which has
become ambiguous in this respect and is therefore before us to be rad-
ically questioned.
It would be foolish to judge that thought has much immediate influ-
ence on events in any era, let alone in ours when a particular destiny of
knowing and making moves to its climax. Our paradigm of knowledge
is the very heart of this civilization's destiny, and such destinies have a
way of working themselves out - that is, in bringing forth from their
principle everything which is implied in that principle. Most scientists
seem so engrossed within this paradigm (and at a lower level, so
engrossed, like everybody else, with their own advancement within
their community) that they seem unable to care to think beyond the
unfolding of the paradigm, let alone to think about it as a particular
aspiration of human thought and to relate it to the highest human aspi-
ration - knowledge of good. Yet in the presence of the obvious disre-
gard of thought in our era, the demand to think does not disappear.
The very glory of the scientific community is that it produces some
members who cannot avoid thinking beyond the dogmas of the scien-
tific paradigm. The scientific community cannot become an engrossed
irrationalism without committing suicide. It is therefore to be expected
that some scientists (let us hope including physicists) will go on think-
ing about the frontiers and limitations of their paradigm at the
moment of its most resplendent power, and in so doing help some of us
outsiders to think more clearly about the frontier and limitations of
making. The influence of such thought on the possible future of this
civilization could not now be predicted.

TECHNOLOGYAS ONTOLOGY

The position taken by many writers is that technology is a tool like any other and
can be used for good or ill. Grant rejected this position. He thought that technol-
ogy had so penetrated the modern world that it had become a nezv mode of being.
Modern human beings could not simply control technology, because technology
arose from particular historical conditions and social circumstances. The com-
puter, then, did impose on us how it should be used, because the pre-condition of
its existence was a certain view of reason and nature, one that cut most human
beings off from the divine and from transcendent justice. Grant delivered this
418 Technology and Modernity

paper in several different versions; its final version appeared as 'Thinking about
Technology' in Technology and Justice.

The Computer Does Not Impose on Us

the Ways It Should Be Used (1976)*

'Beyond industrial growth' can be interpreted with the emphasis on

any of the three words. Different issues will arise depending upon
which word is emphasized. My task in this series is to emphasize
'beyond.' What will it be like to live on the further side of industrial
growth? The other day when I had taken a foreign guest to Burlington
she asked me on our return to Dundas: 'Where is Toronto?' I replied:
'Toronto is on the further side of Burlington.' (What it is to be beyond
Burlington is of course quite beyond my imagination.)
The thinker who first caught the dilemmas of our contemporary soci-
ety called his chief exoteric book Jenseits von Gut und Base, which we
translate as Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche claimed to say what it is for
human beings to be on the further side of good and evil. Taking a spa-
tial preposition, he applied it to the temporal unfolding of events. So
equally 'beyond industrial growth' concerns temporality. It raises for us
the uncertainty of what it will be like to live in a future society the chief
end of which will no longer be able to be industrial growth.
How will it be best to live in a society on the further side of industrial
growth? Those of us who have been conscious of living in North Amer-
ica have known what it is to live within industrial growth. To grasp the
pure essence of what is given in that 'within' would be in Canadian
terms to recollect fully the rule of C.D. Howe.' The uncertainty in
'beyond industrial growth' arises from having known what it is to live
within it, while we do not know the passage of time to the future which
will take us to live beyond it - if indeed we are intended ever to live on
that further side.
The situation in which we find ourselves seems obvious: we are

George Grant, 'The Computer Does Not Impose on Us the Ways It Should Be Used,' in
Beyond Industrial Growth, ed. Abraham Rotstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press
1976), 117-31 (one of six Massey College lectures presented at Massey College in 1974-
5 and broadcast by CBC Radio).
C.D. Howe, an American-born businessman, was a senior cabinet minister in the Liberal
governments of Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent. For Grant he symbolized the pro-
American, pro-business policies that had imperilled Canadian sovereignty.
 Technology as Ontology 419

faced with calamities concerning population, resources, and pollution

if we pursue those policies (here designated as industrial growth)
which have increasingly dominated societies over the last centuries.
The attempt to deal with these interlocking emergencies will require a
vast array of skills and knowledge. Indeed, it will probably take a
greater marshalling of technological mastery to meet these crises than
it took to build the world of industrial growth from which the crises
now arise. This mastery will now have to concentrate around the con-
quest of human nature rather than around the sciences concerned
with non-human nature, as was the case in the past. As Heidegger has
said, the governing and determining science is inevitably going to be
cybernetics.
In North America the government of this science will be increasingly
carried out by the dynamically proliferating power of the medical pro-
fession. Already this profession has been given control over mass feti-
cide, and is more and more an instrument of social control through the
mental health apparatus. North American capitalism increasingly
attempts to establish itself as the mental health state, with the necessary
array of dependent sciences and arts. Beyond the vast lists of new arts
and sciences -which in their modern combination we call technologies
- there will hopefully continue to be the political art. With its proper
mixture of persuasion and force within and between nations, that polit-
ical art is required if human beings are to deal sensibly with the imme-
diate crises. The practical wisdom of politics was called by Plato the
royal techn-e- that art which is higher than all particular arts because it
is called to put the others in a proper order of subordination and
superordination.
Clearly I am not presenting a paper in this series because of any
expertise in the technologies. I have little knowledge of cybernetics.
Certainly I have not the practical wisdom which should lie at the heart
of politics. Being a practitioner neither of any particular technology
nor of the royaltec/m^whatare my credentials for speaking about these
crises? Presumably my business concerns the place of 'values' and
'ideals' in these crises.
In the difficult choices which will be necessary if we are to adapt to a
new view of industrial growth, it is assumed to be essential that we hold
before us 'values' which shall direct our creating of 'history.' If we are
to deal with this future humanly, our acts of 'free' mastery in creating
history must be decided in the light of certain 'ideals,' so that in com-
ing to grips with this crisis we preserve certain human 'values,' and see
420 Technology and Modernity

that 'quality of life' as well as quantity is safeguarded and extended in

our future. For example, clearly the problem of coming to terms with
industrial growth involves great possibilities of tyranny; we must there-
fore be careful that through our decisions for meeting this problem we
maintain the 'values' of free government. In the 'ascent of life' which is
our self-creation, we must see that we create a fuller humanity, a society
of 'persons.' Because of our secularized Christian tradition of liberal-
ism, there is always someone to ice the cake of technological necessity
with some high-minded discussion of 'values' and 'ideals' in the midst
of more careful talk about difficult technological requirements. 'The
question is not simply to solve the problem of industrial growth,' it is
often stated, 'but to solve it in terms which will preserve and extend
human values.'
Yet - and it is a long yet - as soon as such an account is given, it forces
me to disclaim this kind of talk. Why? The way of putting the task - in
terms of such concepts as 'values,' 'ideals,' 'persons,' or 'our creating of
history' - obscures the fact that these very concepts have come forth
from within industrial growth, to give us our image of ourselves from
within that within. Therefore, to be asked to think 'beyond industrial
growth' is to be asked to think the virtue of these concepts. If we do not,
the significance of the phrase 'beyond industrial growth' fades away
into an unthought givenness.
To show that this is so is the purpose of this paper. This may seem a
negative job in the light of all the practical things that need doing. Yet
it is a necessary one. Nearly all our current moral discourse about tech-
nological society falls back to rest upon such unthought concepts as
'values' and 'ideals.' By so doing, it revolves within the hard-rimmed
circle of technological society and cannot issue in thought. The moral
exhortations of our politicians, our scholars, our psychiatrists, our
social scientists are caught in this circle, so that their words become a
tired celebration of technological society. Therefore this negative task
is a necessary preparation to anything positive which may lie beyond it.
I will carry it out by examining at length a statement by a man who
works at making and using computers. He said: 'The computer does
not impose on us the ways it should be used.' Similar statements are
heard about other technical fields and are often generalized into state-
ments about all technologies.
Obviously the statement is made by someone who is aware that com-
puters can be used for purposes of which he does not approve, for
example, the tyrannous control of human beings. This is given in the
 Technology as Ontology 421

word 'should.' He makes a statement in terms of his intimate knowl-

edge of computers which transcends that intimacy in that it is more
than a description of any given computer or of what is technically com-
mon to all such machines. Because he wishes to state something about
the possible good or evil purposes for which computers can be used, he
expresses, albeit in negative form, what computers are, in a way which is
more than their technical description. They are instruments, made by
human skill for the purpose of achieving certain human goals. They are
neutral instruments in the sense that the morality of the goals for which
they are used is determined outside them. Many people who have never
seen a computer and almost certainly do not understand what they do,
feel they are being managed by them and have an undifferentiated fear
about the potential extent of this management. This man, who knows
about the making and using of these machines, states what they are, so
that the undifferentiated sense of danger is put into a perspective,
freed from the terrors of such fantasies as the myth of Dr Frankenstein.
The machines are obviously instruments because their capacities have
been built into them by men, and it is men who must set operating
those capacities for purposes they have determined. All instruments
can be used for wicked purposes and the more complex the capacity of
the instrument the more complex the possible evils. But if we appre-
hend these novelties for what they are, as neutral instruments, we are
better able to determine rationally their potential dangers. That is
clearly a first step in coping with these dangers. We can see that these
dangers are related to the potential decisions of human beings about
how to use computers, and not to the inherent capacities of the
machines. Here indeed is the view of the modern scene I have been
talking about and which is so strongly given to us that it seems to be
common sense itself. We are given an historical situation which
includes certain objective technological facts. It is up to human beings
in their freedom to meet that situation and shape it with their 'values'
and their 'ideals.'
Yet, despite the decency and seeming common sense of the state-
ment 'The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,'
when we try to think what is being said in it, it becomes clear that com-
puters are not being allowed to appear before us for what they are. To
show this, I start from an immediate distinction. The negation in 'the
computer does not impose' concerns the computer's capacities, not its
existence. Yet clearly computers are more than their capacities. They
have been put together from a variety of materials, consummately fash-
422 Technology and Modernity

ioned by a vast apparatus of fashioners. Their existence has required

generations of sustained effort by chemists, metallurgists, and workers
in mines and factories. It has required a highly developed electronics
industry and what lies behind that industry in the history of science and
technique and their novel reciprocal relation. It has required that men
wanted to understand nature, and thought the way to do so was by put-
ting it to the question as object so that it would reveal itself. It has
required the discovery of modern algebra and the development of
complex institutions for developing and applying algebra. Nor should
this be seen as a one-sided relation in which the institutions were nec-
essary to the development of the machines, but were left unchanged by
the discovery of algebra. To be awake in any part of our educational sys-
tem is to know that the desire for these machines shapes those insti-
tutions at their heart in their curriculum, in what the young are
encouraged to know and to do. The computer's existence has required
that the clever of our society be trained within the massive assumptions
about knowing and being and making which have made algebra actual.
Learning within such assumptions is not directed towards a leading out
but towards organizing within. This entails that the majority of those
who rule any modern society will take the purposes of ruling increas-
ingly to be congruent with this account of knowing. In short, the
requirements for the existence of computers is but part of the total his-
torical situation (the word 'destiny' is too ambiguous to be employed at
this point) which is given us as modern human beings. And the condi-
tions of that situation are never to be conceived as static determinants,
but as a dynamic interrelation of tightening determinations.
Obviously computers are, within modern common sense, instru-
ments, and instruments have always been things which are made to be
at human disposal. However, when the capacities of these machines are
abstracted from their historical existence, and when their capacities are
morally neutralized in the negative 'do not impose,' we shut ourselves
off from what 'instrumentality' has now come to mean. For example,
computers are one kind of technology. But just look at what is given in
this very recently arrived word. Two Greek words, techneand logos, are
brought together in a combination which would have been unthink-
able till recently. The new word 'technology' is able to stand because it
brings forth to use the new situation: a quite novel dependence of sci-
ence upon art and a quite novel dependence of art upon science - in
fact, a quite novel reciprocal relation between knowing and making.
This novel relationship stands at the heart of the modern era. The sim-
 Technology as Ontology 423

pie characterization of the computer as neutral instrument makes it

sound as if instruments are now what instruments have always been,
and so hides from us what is completely novel about modern instru-
mentality. It hides from us what we have to understand if we are to
understand industrial growth. The force of the negative 'do not
impose,' as applied to computers, leads us to represent them to our-
selves as if the instrumentality of modern technologies could be mor-
ally neutral. At the same time the very force of the computer as neutral
raises up in the statement, in opposition to that neutrality, an account
of human freedom which is just as novel as our new instruments.
Human freedom is conceived in the strong sense of human beings as
autonomous - the makers of their own laws. This also is a quite new
conception. It was spoken positively and systematically for the first time
in the writings of Kant. It is indeed also a conception without which the
coming to be of our civilization would not have been. But it is a concep-
tion the truth of which needs to be thought, because it was considered
not true by the wise men of many civilizations before our own. In short,
the statement 'the computer does not impose' holds before us a view of
the world with neutral instruments on one side and human autonomy
on the other. But it is just that view of the world that needs to be
thought if we are concerned with 'beyond industrial growth.'
To go further: How widely are we being asked to take the word
'ways' in the assertion that 'the computer does not impose the ways?'
Even if the purposes for which the computer's capabilities should be
used are determined outside itself, are not these capabilities determi-
native of the ways it can be used? To continue the illustration from the
structures of learning and training which are part of all advanced tech-
nological societies: in Ontario there are cards on which local school
authorities can assess children as to their intellectual 'skills' and
'behaviour.' This information is retained by computers. It may be
granted that such computer cards add little to the homogenizing
vision of learning inculcated into the structure by such means as, for
example, centrally controlled teacher training. It may also be granted
that, as computers and their use are more sophisticatedly developed,
the 'information' stored therein will increasingly take account of dif-
ferences. Nevertheless, it is clear that the 'ways' that computers can be
used for storing 'information' can only be ways that increase the
tempo of the homogenizing process in society. Abstracting facts so that
they may be stored as 'information' is achieved by classification, and it
is the very nature of any classifying to homogenize what may be hetero-
424 Technology and Modernity

geneous. Where classification rules, identities and differences can only

appear in its terms. The capabilities of any computer do not allow it to
be used neutrally towards the facts of heterogeneity. Moreover, classifi-
cation by large institutions through investment-heavy machines is obvi-
ously not carried out because of the pure desire to know but because
of convenience of organization.
It is not my purpose at this point to discuss the complex issues of
good and evil involved in the modern movement towards homogeneity,
or to discuss heterogeneity in its profoundest past form, autochthony.
This would require a long discussion of Heidegger's thought. He, the
greatest contemporary thinker of technique, seems to be claiming that
beyond the homelessness of the present, human beings are now called
to a new way of being at home which has passed through the most
extreme homelessness. What is at issue here is simply that the state-
ment about computers tends to hide the fact that their very capabilities
entail that the ways they can be used are never neutral. They can only
be used in homogenizing ways. And because this tends to be hidden in
the statement, the question about the goodness of homogenization is
excluded from the thinking of what it could be to be beyond industrial
growth.
To illustrate the matter from another area of technical change:
Canadians wanted the most efficient car for geographic circumstances
almost similar to those in the county which had first developed a car
usable by many. Our desire for and use of such cars has been a central
cause of our political integration and social homogenization with the
people of the imperial heartland. This was not only because of the vast
imperial organization necessary for building and keeping in motion
such cars, and the direct and indirect political influence of such orga-
nizations, but also because the society with such vehicles tends to
become like every other society with the same. Fifty years ago men
might have said 'the automobile does not impose on us the ways it
should be used.' This would have been a deluding representation of
the automobile. In fact, human beings may still be able to control the
ways that cars are used by preventing, for example, their pollution of
the atmosphere or their freeways from destroying the centre of our cit-
ies. Indeed, in Canada, we may be able to deal better with such ques-
tions, as the history of the Spadina expressway may show, although the

A proposed motorway through the centre of Toronto that would have destroyed many
neighbourhoods. It was cancelled after protests from civic activists.
 Technology as Ontology 425

history of transportation in Montreal speaks in the other direction.

Moreover, in the light of the huge crisis presented to Westerners by the
awakening of the Arabs to modernity, we may even be forced to pass
beyond the private automobile as the chief means of mobility. Be that
as it may, this cannot allow us to represent the automobile to ourselves
as a neutral instrument. In so doing we have abstracted the productive
functions of General Motors or Standard Oil from their political and
social functions, just as their public relations would want. Moreover, we
would have abstracted the automobile from the relations between such
corporations and the public and private corporations of other centres
of empire. Can one speak about 'values' and 'ideals' as if unaware of
what reliable economists tell us: If the present rate of growth of IBM is
extrapolated, that corporation will in twenty-five years be a larger eco-
nomic unit than the economy of any presently constituted state, includ-
ing that of its homeland?
Because of the suffered injustices in both the eastern and western
societies, many educated people see the cutting issue to be decided as
centring around whether technical advance is to be directed under
capitalist or socialist control. What matters is whether the computer is
used in ways which are capitalist or socialist. Some of the best of the
young in the West are held by marxism in revolt against our society,
while it seems that some of the best in Eastern Europe are liberals in
reaction against their society. Despite all the abuses committed in the
name of marxism in eastern societies, this way of thought has remained
a powerful minority influence in the West, just because it seems to
point to a more equitable development of technical society than is pos-
sible under state capitalism. Also marxism, as a system of thought, is
more successful than the liberal ideologies of the West in placing tech-
nique within a corporate framework of purpose beyond the individual.
At any stage of capitalism the interest of all are contractually subordi-
nated to the interest of some. Marxism has been the chief source of a
continuing critique of the facts that our social purposes are determined
by private interests and that science is often harnessed to those pur-
poses by calling it 'value-free.' On the other side, the liberal ideologists
have asserted that our structures lead to a profounder liberation than is
possible under marxist socialism. This assertion is based not only on
the negative criticism that communism is inevitably inhibited into a
rancorous and cruel statism, but also on the positive judgement that
capitalist freedom better opens the way to the development of techni-
cal science. The claims of the Western empire that their system better
426 Technology and Modernity

liberates technology are neither insincere nor unsubstantiated. The

present desire of Russia for American computers surely illustrates that.
However, amidst the passionate ideologists, it is well to remember
what marxism and American liberalism (two Western-produced be-
liefs) hold in common. They both believe that the good progress of the
race is in the direction of the universal society of free and equal human
beings, that is, towards the universal and homogeneous state. They
both assert that the technology, which comes out of the same account
of reason, is the necessary and good means to that end. In saying this I
do not mean to encourage any of that nonsense about 'the end of ide-
ology,' which was put about by a shallow America sociologist a decade
ago. Those who think that the crucial question about technological
societies is whether they develop under marxist or liberal 'ideals' are
given in that thought a source of responsibility for our present situa-
tion. (Who cannot prefer such ardent people to the vast numbers of
the detached who currently retreat into a banal privacy?) Nevertheless,
because of their belief in these ideologies, they are likely to forget that
both sides of the controversy share assumptions which are more funda-
mental than that which divides them. At the immediate and flaming
surface is their common assumption concerning the dependence of
the achievement of a better society in the future upon the mastery of
the human and the non-human by technological science. And that
assumption comes forth from a series of deeper assumptions concern-
ing what is. For example, it is assumed there is something we call 'his-
tory' over against 'nature,' and that it is in that 'history' that human
beings have acquired their 'rationality.' To put it in the pedantic lan-
guage of scholarship about the history of Western thought: both marx-
ism and liberalism are penetrated in their ultimate assumptions by the
thoughts of Rousseau; and in his thought about the origins of human
beings the concept of reason as historical makes its extraordinary pub-
lic arrival.
What calls out for recognition here is that the same apprehension of
what it is to be 'reasonable' leads men to build computers and to con-
ceive the universal and homogeneous society as the highest political
goal. The ways such machines can be used must be at one with certain
conceptions of political purposes, because the same kind of'reasoning'
made the machines and formulated the purposes. To put the matter
extremely simply: the modern 'physical' sciences and the modern
'political' sciences have developed in mutual interpenetration, and we
can only begin to understand that interpenetration in terms of some
 Technology as Ontology 427

common source from which both forms of science found their suste-
nance. Indeed, to think 'reasonably' about the modern account of rea-
son is of such difficulty because that account has structured our very
thinking in the last centuries. For this reason scholars are impotent in
the understanding of it because they are trying to understand that
which is the very form of how they understand. The very idea that 'rea-
son' is that reason which allows us to conquer objective human and
non-human nature controls our thinking about everything.
It cannot be my purpose here to describe the laying of the founda-
tions of that interpenetration of the physical and moral sciences which
is at the heart of Western 'history' and now of world destiny. Such a
mapping of those foundations would require detailed exposition of our
past: what was made and thought and done by the inventors, the scien-
tists, the philosophers, the theologians, the artists, the reformers, the
politicians. Scholarship is very different from thought, although it
often pretends to be the same. But good scholarship can be a support
for thought, in the same way that good doctors can be a support for
health. Suffice it to say here that the root of modern history lies in a
particular experience of 'reason,' and the interpenetration of the
human and non-human sciences that grew from that root. It is an
occurrence which has not yet been understood. Nevertheless, it is an
event the significance of which for good or evil must now be attempted
to be thought. The statement, 'the computer does not impose on us the
ways it should be used,' hides that interpretation. To repeat, it simply
presents us with neutral instruments which we in our freedom can
shape to our Values' and 'ideals.' But the very conceptions 'values' and
'ideals' come from the same form of reasoning which built the comput-
ers. 'Computers' and 'values' both come forth from that stance which
summoned the world before it to show its reasons and bestowed 'val-
ues' on the world. Those 'values' are supposed to be the creations of
human beings and have, linguistically, taken the place of the tradi-
tional 'good,1 which was not created but recognized. In short, comput-
ers do not present us with neutral means for building any kind of
society. All their alternative ways lead us towards the universal and
homogeneous state. Our use of them is exercised within that mysteri-
ous modern participation in what we call 'reason.' Participation in that
particular conception of reason is the strangest of all our experiences,
and the most difficult to think in its origins.
To go further, because computers are produced from modern rea-
soning, the strongest ambiguity in the statement, 'the computer does
428 Technology and Modernity

not impose on us the ways it should be used,' is that our novelty is pre-
sented to us as if human beings 'should' use these machines for certain
purposes and not for others. But what does the word 'should' mean in
advanced technological societies? Is it not of the essence of our novelty
that 'shouldness,' as it was once affirmed, can no longer hold us in its
claiming?
'Should' was originally the past tense of 'shall.' It is still sometimes
used in a conditional sense to express greater uncertainty about the
future than the use of 'shall'; ('I shall get a raise this year' is more cer-
tain than 'I should get a raise this year.' The same is in that wonderful
colloquialism from the home of our language: 'I shouldn't wonder.')
'Should' has gradually taken over the sense of 'owing' from 'shall.' (In
its origins 'owing' was given in the word 'shall' when used as a transitive
verb.) In the sentence 'the computer does not impose on us the ways it
should be used' we are speaking about human actions which express
'owing.' If the statement about computers were in positive form 'the
computer does impose on us the way it should be used,' the debt would
probably be understood as from human beings to machine. We can say
of a good car that we owe it to the car to lubricate it properly or not to
ride the clutch. We would mean it in the same sense that we owe it to
ourselves to try to avoid contradicting ourselves, if we wish to think out
some matter clearly. If we want the car to do what it is fitted for - which
is, in the traditional usage, its good - then we must look after it. But the
'should' in the statement about the computer is clearly not being used
about what is owed from men to the machine. What is, then, the nature
of the debt spoken? To what or to whom do human beings owe it? Is
that debt conditional? For example, if men 'should' use computers
only in ways that are compatible with constitutional government and
never as instruments of tyranny, to what or to whom is this required
support of constitutional government owed? To ourselves? to other
human beings? to evolution? to nature? to 'history?' to reasonableness?
to God?
There have been many descriptions of our time as essentially charac-
terized by a darkening or even disappearance of any conception of
good. These have often been made by those who are dismayed by the
uncertainty of our era and find solace from the suffering of that dismay
in nostalgia for some other era. Indeed, as human beings have come to
believe that their affirmations of goodness are not justified by reason or
nature, history, or God, the effect upon many has been what some have
called 'nihilism.' This belief has had wide political significance because
 Technology as Ontology 429

it has become possible for many through mass literacy. Mass training
has produced in North America that intensely vulgar phenomenon,
popular wised-upness. I include within mass training the present uni-
versity system. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to characterize the modern
West as a society of nihilism, that is, as if people had no sense of what is
good. If we used the word 'good' in its most general modern sense to
stand for that which we approve, and 'bad' for that which we deplore, it
is evident that the majority of modern people give their shared disap-
proval to certain forms of life. Can we not say that for most 'freedom' to
do what they want in such realms as sexuality is an evident good? Most
modern people consider good those political leaders who combine
seeming resolution with evident charm. The very influence of ideolo-
gies in our era, whether marxism, American liberalism, or National
Socialism, has surely not been a mark of nihilism, but rather a mark of
how much human beings wanted the evident goods that were put
before them evidently.
Therefore, it is deluding if we characterize our novel modern situa-
tion as nihilistic. But at the same time we have to be aware that some
great change has taken place. To characterize that change, it is best to
state that it has fallen to the lot of people who are truly modern to
apprehend goodness in a different way from all previous societies.
'Goodness' is now apprehended in a way which excludes from it all
'owingness.' To generalize this as clearly as I am able: the traditional
Western view of goodness is that which meets us with an excluding
claim and persuades us that in obedience to that claim we will find what
we are fitted for. The modern view of goodness is that which is advanta-
geous to our creating richness of life (or, if you like, the popular mod-
ern propagandists' 'quality of life').
What is true of the modern conception of goodness (which appears
in advanced technological societies and which distinguishes it from
older conceptions of goodness) is that it does not include the assertion
of an owed claim which is intrinsic to our desiring. Owing is always pro-
visory upon what we desire to create. Obviously we come upon the
claims of others and our creating may perforce be limited particularly
by the state, because of what is currently permitted to be done to oth-
ers. However, such claims, whether within states or internationally, are
seen as contractual, that is, provisional. This exclusion of non-provisory
owing from our interpretation of desire means that what is summoned
up by the word 'should' is no longer what was summoned up among
our ancestors. Its evocation alwavs includes an 'if.' Moreover, the
430 Technology and Modernity

arrival in the world of this changed interpretation of goodness is inter-

related to the arrival of technological civilization. The liberation of
human desiring from any supposed excluding claim, so that it is
believed that we freely create values, is a face of the same liberation in
which men overcame chance by technology - the liberty to make hap-
pen what we want to make happen.
'The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used'
asserts the very essence of the modern view (human ability freely to
determine what happens) and then puts that freedom in the service of
the very 'should' which that same modern novelty has denied. The
resolute mastery to which we are summoned in 'does not impose' is the
very source of difficulty in apprehending goodness as 'should.' There-
fore, the 'should' in the statement has only a masquerading resonance
when it is asked to provide positive moral content to the actions we are
summoned to concerning computers. It is a word carried over from the
past to be used in a present which is only ours because the assumptions
of that past were criticized out of public existence. The statement there-
fore cushions us from the full impact of the novelties it asks us to con-
sider. It pads us against wondering about the disappearance of 'should'
in its ancient resonance, and what this disappearance may portend for
the future.
Statements such as this are increasingly common in the liberal world
because we feel the need to buttress the morality of our managers in
their daily decisions. Indeed, the more it becomes possible to conceive
that we might not be able to control the immensity of the apparatus
and the constantly changing emergencies it presents us with, the more
intense become the calls for moral 'values' and 'ideals.' Technological
society is presented to us as a set of neutral means, something outside
ourselves, and human beings are presented as in touch with some con-
stant, from out of which constancy they are called upon to deal with the
new external crises. But obviously all that is given us in the technologi-
cal sciences denies that constancy, that eternality. What happens is that
constancy is appealed to in practical life and denied in intellectual life.
In such a situation the language of eternality is gradually removed from
all serious public realms, because it is made completely unresonant by
what dominates the public world. The residual and unresonant con-
stant appealed to in the sentence about the computer is the word
'should.' But the intellectual life which allowed the coming to be of
computers has also made 'should' almost unthinkable.
I have discussed this sentence at great length to show that when we
 Technology as Ontology 431

look at our present situation as if we in our freedom were called upon

to impose 'values' and 'ideals' on technological situations seen as
'objective' to us, we are not beyond industrial growth, but within that
which brought industrial growth to be. 'Values' and 'ideals,' 'persons'
and 'the creating of history' are at their very heart the technological
speaking. Let me concentrate my essential point in a criticism of a
recent writing by Professor C.B. Macpherson. In his Democratic Ttieory,
an early section is entitled 'The race between ontology and technol-
ogy.' It is just such words that I am trying to show as deluding. Macpher-
son identifies ontologies with 'views of the essence of man,' and writes
of 'a fateful race between ontological change and technological
change.' One might ask: Is not technological change an aspect of what
is, and therefore not something other than ontological change? But
what is above all misleading in such words is that they obscure the fact
that every act of scientific discovery or application comes forth from an
ontology which so engrosses us that it can well be called our Western
destiny. Technology is not something over against ontology; it is the
ontology of the age. It is for us an almost inescapable destiny. The great
question is not then 'the race between technology and ontology,' but
what is the ontology which is declared in technology? What could it be
to be 'beyond' it, and would it be good to be 'beyond' it?
The foregoing has not been stated for the sake of increasing
the sense of human impotence. Aesthetic pessimism is a form of self-
indulgence to which protected academics are particularly prone. Inso-
far as one is aware that one is prone to such sick pessimism, it should
be dealt with in privacy and not presented publicly. It always matters
what we do. Moreover, at a much deeper level, authentic despair is a
human possibility and a very great evil. Therefore, it must be prepared
for. Our first obligation is to seek acquaintance with joy so that any
arrival of despair does not carry us into madness. The complete
absence of joy is madness. However, the stating of the facts in any given
situation has nothing to do with despair, but only with the possible
destruction of inadequate sources of hope - the destruction of which is
a necessary part of all our lives.
Rather, my purpose is to state the profundity with which technologi-
cal civilization enfolds us as our destiny. Coming to meet us out of the
very substance of our past, that destiny has now become, not only our
own, but that of the species as a whole. Moreover, this destiny is not
alone concerned with such obvious externals that we can blow our-
selves up or ameliorate diabetes or have widespread freedom from
432 Technology and Modernity

labour or watch our distant wars on television. It is a destiny which pre-

sents us with what we think of the whole, with what we think is good,
with what we think good is, with how we conceive sanity and madness,
beauty and ugliness. It is a destiny which enfolds us in our most imme-
diate experiences: what we perceive when we encounter a bird or a
tree, a child, or a road. It equally enfolds us in less tangible appercep-
tions such as temporality. My cruder purpose is to make clear that that
destiny is not a situation like picking and choosing in a supermarket;
rather, it is like a package deal.
When we, as Western people, put to ourselves the question of what
can lie 'beyond industrial growth,' we are liable to be asking it as a
problem within the package which is that destiny. It is taken as a prob-
lem of the same order as that which we are currently meeting because
of our dependence on oil and the Arab awakening. To say this is not to
belittle such problems or to seem to stand in proud aloofness from
them. They have to be met and will require great wisdom - indeed,
greater wisdom than has characterized our English-speaking rulers
since 1914.
However, even at the immediate level of the pragmatic, the question-
ing in 'beyond industrial growth' begins to reveal the universal which is
spoken in technology. We move into the tightening circle in which
more technological science is called for to meet the problems which
technological science has produced. In that tightening circle, the over-
coming of chance is less and less something outside us, but becomes
more and more the overcoming of chance in our own species, in our
very own selves. Every new appeal for a more exact cybernetics means,
in fact, forceful new means of mastery over the most intimate aspects of
the lives of masses of people. Particularly among some of those who are
the patients of that mastery and among those who keep some hesitation
about their part in enforcing it, questioning cannot be wholly
repressed. For example, will it be possible to hide entirely what is being
spoken universally about our own species in the massive programs of
feticide which characterize modern societies? Will it be possible to hide
what is being spoken universally in the advances in reproductive biol-
ogy and behavioural psychology, as those advances become part of our
everyday lives? Moreover, when what is spoken there universally is lis-
tened to, will it be able to be accepted as including in its universality the
hunger and thirst for justice?
For thinkers, the universal in 'beyond industrial growth' must appear
as the package deal becomes increasingly explicit. With that explicit-
 Technology as Ontology 433

ness inevitably comes the central theoretical question of this era. Can
our thinking be satisfied with the historicist universal? If the universal
appearing as historicism can be known as only a masquerading of the
universal, then it will be possible to ask the following question: In all
that has been practised and thought and made by Western human
beings in their dedication to the overcoming of chance, what has there
been of good? What has perhaps been found? What has perhaps been
lost? What have these possible losings and findings to do with what we
can know of the transhistorical whole?
It looks very likely that amidst the pressing calls for cybernetic orga-
nization in our immediate future, there will be little social patience for
those who think about these questions. Thinkers will be accused of
vagueness and uncertainty, impracticality, and self-indulgence in times
of crisis. For example, it is clear that the great intellectual achievement
of modernity is its physics, and that the scientific community which ulti-
mately feeds on that achievement is the most intellectually influential
in our midst. Yet in its pride, that community is, with rare exceptions,
contemptuous and impatient of any thought which is 'beyond' solu-
tions. Historicist scholarship is tolerated because it is unlikely to pass
over into thought. Therefore, I would predict that those who want to
think will have to develop a more than usual irony to protect them-
selves from this impatience.
In the face of the complexity, immensity, and uncertainty of that
which calls to be questioned, it may, indeed, seem that thinkers are
impotent as aids to the inescapable immediacies of the public realm.
The originating tradition concerning rationality in the West was that it
had something to do with happiness and therefore something to do
with throwing light upon the awful responsibilities of time. In the
ambiguous heart of Plato's dialogues, philosophy included political
philosophy. This relation to practice may seem to have been lost when
thinkers are called to wander in the chasms which have been opened
up by education for the overcoming of chance. It may seem that, when
thought wanders in these chasms, it becomes useless to the public
realm. Yet the darkness which envelops the Western world because of
its long dedication to the overcoming of chance is just a fact. Thinkers
who deny the fact of that darkness are no help in illuminating a finely
tempered practice for the public realm. The job of thought at our time
is to bring into the light that darkness as darkness. If thinkers are
turned away from this by becoming tamed confederates in the solution
of some particular problem, they have turned away from the occupa-
434 Technology and Modernity

don they are called to. The consequent division between thought and
practice is therefore even greater than at most times and places. That
division is a price that has to be paid by people given over primarily
either to practice or to thought, because of the false unity between
thought and practice which has dominated our civilization so long in
its dedication to the overcoming of chance. That false unity presses on
us in the two leading ideologies of our age - marxism and American lib-
eralism - in both of which thought has been made almost to disappear
as it was perverted into a kind of practice.
Those of us who are Christians have been told that there is some-
thing 'beyond' both thought and practice. Both are means or ways. In
their current public division from each other, the memory of their joint
insufficiency will be helpful to both. What is also necessary for both
types of life is a continuing dissatisfaction with the fact that the dark-
ness of our era leads to such a division between them. In this dissatisfac-
tion lies the hope of taking a first step: to bring the darkness into light
as darkness.

TECHNOLOGY AND FAITH

This important paper was delivered to an American audience and published in

a large anthology that was not widely available. It deserves to be much better
known than it is, since it contains some of Grant's most profound reflections on
the origins of technology in Western Christianity. This version was corrected by
Grant for future publication.

It seems to me the case that western Christianity is now going to go through a

great purging of its authority because it was in the civilization where it was dom-
inant that the worst form of secularity has arisen and is now likely to become
worldwide. Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are going to pay terri-
ble prices, both extrinsic and intrinsic, for the ultimate relation they main-
tained with that progressive materialism. This kind of historical remark has no
relation at all to the truth of Christianity which is just given for me in the per-
fection of Christ, which to me can only be thought in terms of Trinitarianism
(though through my own unclarity I never much understand what is meant by
the third hypostasis). My particular function in the midst of what seems to me
the evident fall of western Christianity is to try to understand just a small
 Technology and Faith 435

amount of what was at fault in this particular manifestation of Christianity, so

that one plays a minute part in something that will take centuries - namely the
rediscovery of authoritative Christianity. I have no doubt that that will, slowly
and through very great suffering, occur - because Christianity tells the truth
about the most important matter- namely the perfection of God and the afflic-
tion of human beings, and it has been given that truth in a way no other reli-
gion has.
- George Grant to Derek Bedson, 2 February 1978

Justice and Technology (1984)

Christ said: Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice
(Matthew 5:6). Socrates said that it is better to suffer injustice than to
inflict it (Crito 49b-e; Gorgias 474b ff). It is not my purpose here to discus
the relation between these two statements. That would be to raise the
question which in Jewish terms is the relation between Athens and
Jerusalem, and in Christian terms the relation between Socrates and
Christ. I will simply abstract from discussing whatever possible differ-
ences have been said to distinguish these two statements and take them
as saying something common aboutjustice. Nor is it my purpose to dis-
cuss the even more mysterious fact that one may be grasped by the
truth of Christ's proposition, even when one's own hungering and
thirsting is not much directed toward justice. It is never one's business
to concern oneself with other people's ultimate hungers and thirsts;
but I know something about my own, yet am still grasped by the truth of
that proposition. Put generally, this question is: If the intellect is
enlightened by love, and therefore access to the most important knowl-
edge is dependent on love, how is it possible to assent to the truth of a
proposition which is made from way beyond one's own capacities of
love?
My intention is to discuss the relation between 'technology' and the
statements of Christ and Socrates. I do not mean by 'technology' the
sum of all modern techniques, but that unique co-penetration of know-
ing and making, of the arts and sciences which originated in Western
Europe and has now become worldwide. Behind such descriptions lies

George Grant, 'Justice and Technology,' in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian
Analysis and Exegesis, ed. Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America 1984). 237-46.
436 Technology and Modernity

the fact that 'technology' is an affirmation concerning what is; it

remains unfathomed, but is very closely interwoven with that primal
affirmation made by medieval Westerners as they accepted their Chris-
tianity in a new set of apperceptions. That affirmation had something
to do with a new content given by Western people to the activity of 'will-
ing.' 'Technology' is the closest, yet inadequate word for what that new
affirmation has become as it is now worked out in us and around us.
But to use that inadequate word is to grant the unfathomedness of the
affirmation.
Leaving aside the crucial question of what it would be to live or
think 'outside' or 'beyond' that apprehension, it is certainly true that
all of us are in it in the sense that its manifestations, both outward and
inward, make up most of our daily lives. For example, as university peo-
ple the institutions we work for are in their heart and movement
becoming more and more attuned to that apprehension in its modern
moment. Moreover, it would be foolish to say that 'technology' domi-
nates chemistry departments and not religion departments. Much
scholarship in religion sounds the pure chord of the affirmation I have
called 'technology.'
This paper is about an ambiguity in the relation between technology
and justice (in its fullest sense.) Clearly technology has been an affirma-
tion concerning justice. I need not press the obvious point that among
its originators and its practitioners, it was thought that the progress of
the arts and sciences would alleviate the human estate. Negatively it
would eliminate many injustices which had characterized the past; pos-
itively it would open new apprehensions of justice by making a greater
percentage of the population wise. Many of those in all parts of the
globe who presently are most deeply engrossed in the progress of the
arts and the sciences still see their engrossment in terms of the realiza-
tion of justice. The ambiguity I wish to point to is not the practical one
that from this technology have come forth powers that can be used for
purposes that speak against justice. It is not my business here to
describe behaviour modification, the organization of the mass destruc-
tion of the unborn, the corporate bureaucracies in which human
beings are engulfed or, at a less immediate level, the destruction of
such intermediate institutions as the family or the country. We could all
make out lists of such issues which are now coming forth from technol-
ogy in its most obvious sense, and which threaten justice in its most
obvious sense. Indeed, many of the best people engrossed in that
apprehension which I have called 'technology' are aware of these diffi-
 Technology and Faith 437

culties, and want to carry that apprehension to its limits in the hopes of
making the world more congruent with justice. The enormous array of
cybernetic techniques being used by the environmentalists is an exam-
ple of what I mean. In so doing such people are denying that these
present difficulties constitute a real ambiguity in 'technology.' (Of
course, all of us as practical people living in our civilization must inevi-
tably be concerned in the name of justice with trying to do something
about one or other of these problems.)
The ambiguity with which I am here concerned is not that which
arises from difficulties such as these. Rather, it has to do with the fact
that the realization of technology has meant for all of us a very dim-
ming of our ability to think justice lucidly. The ambiguity is that tech-
nology, which came into the world carrying in its heart a hope about
justice, has in its realization dimmed the ability of those who live in it to
think justice. Something has been lost. It is for this reason that I started
with statements by Socrates and Christ.
At a common sense level it is clear what I mean by that dimming or
that loss. 'Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice.' What
can the identity of the just and the fortunate mean to people who take
their representation of reality from the terms given in technology? At
all times and places, the unity between happiness and justice seems par-
ticularly incredible. (It is necessary to say in parenthesis why I have cut
out the completion of the statement. 'Happy are those who are hungry
and thirsty for justice because they will be satisfied.' I have done so to
leave out any discussion of what that satisfaction will be. I take for
granted that Christ did not mean any satisfaction or reward external to
or other than justice itself. One could translate 'they will be satisfied' by
'they will have their fill of it.' Often when I am feeling vengeful, as
Canadian Scots often are, for instance against the American oil corpo-
rations and their greed, I might say, T hope they have their fill of it.' So
one can say of the saints, 'Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty
for justice for they will have their fill of it.' Indeed, what makes one
tremble when one thinks about the saints is that one knows how painful
is going to be their journey to that joy.)
Most of our influential contemporaries would deny that anything
essential has been lost in our ability to think justice during the realiza-
tion of technology. At the centre of this denial would lie the pungent
assertion about justice which was in the heart of 'technology' from its
origins. Progress in the control of nature is essential for the improve-
ment of justice in the world. And what is justice apart from its exist-
438 Technology and Modernity

ence in the world? Progress in the control of nature has freed human
beings from such obvious injustices as labour and disease. It has not
only freed us from the bonds of necessity which held us in unjust situa-
tions, but also in that liberation has given us time to care about the
realization of justice in a way that was not possible when we were
bound to immediate tasks. Those who justify the modern with explicit
ethical doctrines would assert, beyond the practical claim, that justice
can now appear to thought with greater clarity than ever before,
because it can now be understood as utterly the work of human beings.
This assertion would be common to English-speaking liberals, to marx-
ists, to Nietzscheans, or to those who hold some combination of all
three. By saying that justice depends on a contract maintained in a for-
mal democracy, or on the proletariat when it has become conscious of
the needs of all human beings everywhere, or on the great persons
who want to use our conquest of nature beautifully and nobly, we have
allowed justice to appear 'authentically' by taking away from under it
those safety nets which guaranteed it as being in the nature of things.
As for hungering and thirsting for justice, that is more widely present
than ever before. Democrats hunger and thirst when they work to see
that the contract will become complete; marxists hunger and thirst
when they strive for a society in which justice is not only formal but
substantial; the noble and the beautiful hunger and thirst when they
think beyond being masters of the earth and impose beauty and nobil-
ity upon that mastery. Where is, then, the loss? We have been freed
negatively from those 'otherworldly' interests which diverted us from
and allowed us to put up with the injustices of this world. We have
been freed positively to take our lives into our own hands and to know
that it depends on us alone to give them a just and noble content.
What is, then, this talk of a loss concerning justice which has occurred
with the coming to be of modernity?
I long to be able to express it with superb clarity, but am quite
unable. The following, though inadequate, is as near as I can get: in
affirming that justice is what we are fitted for, one is asserting that a
knowledge of justice is intimated to us in the ordinary occurrences of
space and time, and that through those occurrences one is reaching
towards some knowledge of good which is not subject to change, and
which rules us in a way more pressing than the rule of any particular
goods. In the Phaedrus Plato writes of the beauty of the world, and
Socrates states that that beauty is what leads to justice. Beauty is always
seducing while justice often appears unattractive. If in this world we
 Technology and Faith 439

could see justice as it is in itself, it would engulf us in loveliness. But that

is not our situation. Its demands make it often unattractive both to our
conveniences and in our apprehension of the situations which call for
our response. Because the harmony of beauty is in some sense immedi-
ately apprehended, it is the means whereby we are led to that more
complete harmony which is justice itself. (The unseducing side of jus-
tice described by Plato always seems similar to Isaiah's statement that
the redeemer will not be externally charming. This is well to remember
in these days of charming political 'redeemers.') This affirmation
about justice can be put negatively by saying that if we are realistic
about our loves and realistic about any conceivable conditions of the
world, and if we apprehend the unchangingness of justice, we must
understand that justice is in some sense other to us, and has a cutting
edge which often seems to be turned upon our very selves. I have tried
to express elsewhere the unchangingness of justice as given us in the
fact that we can know in advance actions which must never be done.
What is meant by realistic about our loves is that justice is very often not
what we want in any recognizable sense of 'want.' What is meant by real-
ism about the conditions of the world is that I cannot imagine any con-
ditions in which some lack of harmony in some human being would not
be putting claims upon us - the meeting of which would often carry us
whither we would not. But as soon asjustice as otherness is expressed in
that negation, we must hold with it the positive affirmation that we can
know justice as our need in the sense that it is necessary to happiness,
and we can have intimations of loving its harmony. The holding
together in thought of our need and love of justice and its demanding
otherness is expressed in ontological terms by Plato when he writes of
justice as i8ea. To put the matter in a popular way: justice is an
unchanging measure of all our times and places, and our love of it
defines us. But our desiring need of an unchanging good which calls us
to pay its price is theoretically incongruent with what is thought in
'technology.'
This has been stated unclearly not only for the reason that thinking
about justice is not the same as loving it and therefore knowing it, but
also because even within thought it is so difficult to balance carefully
what is said positively with what is said negatively. It is inadequate either
to affirm God in contrast to the world as a vale of tears, or to affirm God
as subsidiary to process as in Whitehead. For example, one can easily

A form (Greek).
440 Technology and Modernity

describe realized human love these days as if it were the height for
human beings; while some describe it as if it were not qualitatively dif-
ferent from our need for food. How difficult it is to see it neither as the
height nor as simply an appetite, but as an intimation of that immedi-
acy of justice which Plato has described as fire catching fire.
Let me say, in historical parenthesis, that this description tries to
avoid both Aristotle's and Kant's accounts of the matter. This may
seem like a remark of pride against such geniuses, and it would take
too long here to express clearly why I want to reject Aristotle's criticism
of Plato's account of idea, and Kant's assertion of the autonomy of the
will. My failure of description is bound up with three difficulties con-
cerning language. First, what is the point of speaking of this loss, in
which we live minute by minute, with language which no longer has
meaning for those minutes? When I said that Plato spoke ontologically
about i8ea, this used archaic language. Think what 'idea' means today.
Any use of the word 'soul' falls into the same danger. Or again, the
phrase 'oblivion of eternity' necessarily expresses the loss archaically.
Secondly, one must, on the other hand, beware of using language
about that loss which springs from the new forms of thought which
have caused it. For example, the word 'transcendence' is now popular
with many theologians. It seems to me a dangerous word because it
generally comes forth from that account of freedom as autonomy,
which is itself just part of the loss. 'Transcendence' has been so often
used in an existentialist exaltation of human beings' inability ever to
be at peace. Of course, there are more dangerous terms, used regu-
larly by theologians, such as 'historical consciousness.' The modern
world is full of language which arises inevitably and consistently from
'technology,' and which is better used by those who do not think the
loss a loss. The main task of thought is the purging of such language.
Rahner or Bultmann would have been of more use if they had read
and thought more, and written less.
Thirdly and more important, the question of language is difficult
because it must never move away from what is pressed upon us concern-
ing justice in our daily situations. This is the difficulty for all of us as
thinkers. If we are to speak about the essence of justice we must always
start from where it meets us in an immediate way every day. Put gener-
ally, this is to say that the language of ontology must proceed from the

Rudolf Bultmann (1884—1976), controversial German theologian, author of Jesus and

Mythology (1958).
 Technology and Faith 441

nerve-racking situations of justice. It is often said these days that the

task of thinkers is to reclaim the possibility of ontology, which has been
lost in the realization of technology. This is why Heidegger is so popu-
lar with many continental theologians. But the difficulty of this position
is that modern thought at its height does not deny ontology; rather it
asserts an ontology which excludes what is essential about justice. It is
not ontology per se which is the heart of our task as thinkers; rather, it
is the search for an ontology which carries in itself the essence of jus-
tice. Even to begin this one must never turn away from the realities and
immediacies of justice in the here and now. To take an absurd example
of this from the English-speaking world, it has always seemed to me that
Bertrand Russell, for all his crazy negations and confusions about
ontology, is nearer to philosophy than his colleague Alfred N. White-
head, despite the latter's appeals to ontology. Russell's thought is filled
with the intensities of the modern world, however inadequate his
response; Whitehead's writings taste of secularized Anglicanism seek-
ing a Harvard substitute for prayer. To put this in all its terror: 'Human
nature is so arranged that any desire of the soul which has not passed
through the flesh by way of actions, movements and attitudes which
correspond to it naturally, has no reality in the soul. It is only there as a
phantom.' 1 Much modern theology seems to me such academic phan-
toms, because it gives the appearance of being abstracted from the
immediacies of justice.
The failure to live in the world of 'technology' as it is can be found
even in the writings of the best modern Anglican theologian, Austin
Farrer. He wrote with beautiful accuracy about ontology as the founda-
tion for any teaching of Christianity. Yet, in dispute with the analytical
philosophers of his day in Oxford, he could write: 'The foundations of
morality are platitudinous valuations; the subjects of moral discussion
are contested priorities. People who discuss the platitudes are intolera-
ble - why try, for example, to make an issue of the question, whether it
is good that we should care for other men or for ourselves alone; or
whether instinctive appetite should ever be controlled.'" I remember
the shock of surprise in reading those words. Why, the man does not
really know the world he inhabits! Here is an educated philosophic
theologian deluding himself about what has come to be believed with
'technology.' If we attempt as thinkers (even in tear and trembling)
the great task of ontology, the necessary cutting edge is only main-
tained by being in the world of 'technology' in as full a consciousness
as we are able.
442 Technology and Modernity

What has been lost is exposed even in the writings of Heidegger.

This fact is itself a great ambiguity, because he is the writer who has
expounded, as no other, what is given in the word 'technology.' This is
not only done in the writing which has 'technique' in its title, but in all
his later writings. I would single out Der Satz vom Grund (so inade-
quately translated as The Principle of Reason) as the writing where he
most wonderfully brings it forth. His call to thought is to think beyond
'technology' in this night of the world. But - and what a 'but' it is - the
ontology he is moving towards excludes the one thing needful -
namely justice in its full and demanding purity. Let me refer quickly to
two writings: (1) His discussion of techne&nd dzfethroughout his Intro-
duction to Metaphysics, and much more important, (2) his 'Plato's Doc-
trine of Truth.' In the latter he is criticizing Plato's account of 'being'
as 'idea,' because it is the foundation of the definition of truth as cor-
rectness and therefore is the foundation of the age of metaphysics.
According to Heidegger, this is the originating affirmation from which
Western technological rationalism comes forth. The work proceeds
from a translation of 'the Cave' in the Republic, and a commentary on
aletheia in that passage. It is a remarkable writing. However, what is so
singularly absent is any discussion of the politeia or the virtues, in terms
of which 'the Sun,' 'the Line,' and 'the Cave' were written. The
extraordinarily powerful and painfilled language used by Plato con-
cerning the breaking of the chains, the climb out of the cave into the
light of the sun and the return to the cave, are all related to the virtue
of justice and its dependence upon the sun. This is absent from
Heidegger's commentary. From his translation and commentary one
would not understand that in the Sun, the Line, and the Cave, the met-
aphor of sight is to be taken as love. That which we love and which is
the source of our love is outside the cave, but it is the possibility of the
fire in the cave and of the virtues which make possible the getting out
of the cave. When Heidegger defines good as used by Plato simply for-
mally, as what we are fitted for, he does not give content to that fitting
as Socrates does when he says that it is better to suffer injustice than to
inflict it. Heidegger describes Plato's doctrine of truth so that 'being'
as 'idea' is abstracted from that love of justice in terms of which 'idea'
can alone be understood as separate. Goodness itself is 'beyond
being.' This is why I take even Heidegger's wonderful account of tech-
nology as having been written within that loss which has come with
'technology.' It is in this sense that Heidegger is an historicist,
although the most consummate of the historicists.
 Technology and Faith 443

Some theologians and scholars of the Bible take Heidegger's ontol-

ogy as a means of bringing out of concealment the real truth of Chris-
tianity, because they think that his overcoming of metaphysics will
allow Christianity to be expressed in a way that was not possible in the
past. This is a worthy intention; but it is a practice of great peril if it can
only be achieved by eliminating from Christianity that hunger and
thirst for justice which is certainly absent from Heidegger's ontology.
It is unwise of theologians to play around with ontologies without
knowing their source. Many times Heidegger has quoted with approval
Nietzsche's dictum 'Christianity is Platonism for the people.'3 If the
theologians who use Heidegger read his acceptance of that dictum,
they may take it to be applied only to the Christianity which in the past
clothed itself in Greek metaphysics. But in using the new ontology, will
they be able to hold on to the happiness in hungering and thirsting for
justice?
The trouble with talking about loss and perhaps even my constant
references to Plato is that they may seem to imply a turning away from
the present. In modern university circumstances such an implication
can lead to the substitution of scholarship for thought, and it will be
that historicist scholarship which has done so much to destroy for us
the presence of the past. Certainly thought will not be achieved by turn-
ing away from 'technology.' Meeting 'technology' face to face means
for the thinker neither acceptance nor rejection but trying to know it
for what it is. (I must emphasize yet once again that justice may well
require the rejection of particular techniques.)
The point of this writing has simply been to emphasize that knowing
'technology' for what it is requires the recognition of what has been lost
politically and ethically. Equally important would be to understand
what has been found in its coming to be. I must finally say that the
thought which is the task of most of us, and is indeed important, always
waits upon something of a different order - that thought which has
been transfigured by hungering and thirsting for justice.

NOTES

1 Simone Weil, 'Theorie des sacraments,' in Pensees sans ordre concernant

I'amour deDieu (Paris: Gallimard 1962), 135. For the published English trans-
lation of this passage see Simone Weil, 'Theory of the Sacraments,' in Gate-
way to God (Glasgow: Williams Collins and Sons 1974), 65.
444 Technology and Modernity

2 Austin Farrer, 'A Starting-Point for the Philosophical Examination of Theo-

logical Belief,' in Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philo-
sophical Theology (London: George Allen and Union 1958), 14.
3 See, e.g., An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor 1961), 90.
 Part 6
The Beautiful and the Good
This page intentionally left blank
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS

Grant was deeply moved by poetry and himself wrote poems from time to time. The
following is the only one he published. It is significant that the topic is Good Fri-
day, since Grant believed that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was the centre of the
Christian faith. He rejected the idea that the resurrection was somehow a trium-
phant reversal of the defeat of the crucifixion.

Good Friday (1952)

Oh dearest word, the very Word indeed,

Breathes on our striving, for the cross is done;
All fate forgotten, and from judgement freed,
Call Him then less - Who shows us this - Your Son?
Look it is here at death, not three days later,
The love that binds the granite into being,
Here the sea's blueness finds its true creator,
His glance on Golgotha our sun for seeing.
Nor say the choice is ours, what choice is left?
Forgiveness shows God's Will most fully done,
There on the cross the myth of hell is cleft
And the black garden blazes with the sun.
Hold close the crown of thorns, the scourge, the rod,
For in his sweat, full front, the face of God.

INTIMATIONS OF DEPRIVAL

This is one of Grant's most beautiful and profound essays. Written as a conclud-
ing piece for Technology and Empire, it addresses what Grant calls 'intima-

George Grant, 'Good Friday,' United Church Observer, vol. 14, no. 3 (1 April 1952), 3.
448 The Beautiful and the Good

tions of deprival,' the paradox that we are often most aware of justice and the
good when they are absent from a thing or a person where we would expect them
to be. The injustice of the death of a child, for example, often makes us aware of
the existence of justice and its claims. If there were no justice, how could we feel
that a child's death was unjust?

A Platitude (1969)*

We can hold in our minds the enormous benefits of technological

society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it may have deprived us,
because technique is ourselves. All description or definitions of tech-
nique which place it outside ourselves hide from us what it is. This
applies to the simplest accounts which describe technological advance
as new machines and inventions as well as to the more sophisticated
which include within their understanding the whole hierarchy of
interdependent organizations and their methods. Technique comes
forth from and is sustained in our vision of ourselves as creative free-
dom, making ourselves, and conquering the chances of an indifferent
world.
It is difficult to think whether we are deprived of anything essential to
our happiness, just because the coming to be of the technological soci-
ety has stripped us above all of the very systems of meaning which dis-
closed the highest purposes of man, in terms of which, therefore, we
could judge whether an absence of something was in fact a deprival.
Our vision of ourselves as freedom in an indifferent world could only
have arisen insofar as we had analysed to disintegration those systems of
meaning, given in myth, philosophy, and revelation, which had held
sway over our progenitors. For those systems of meaning all mitigated
both our freedom and the indifference of the world, and in so doing
put limits of one kind or another on our interference with chance and
the possibilities of its conquest.
It may be said that to use the language of deprival is to prejudice the
issue, because what has gone can more properly be described as illu-
sions, horizons, superstitions, taboos which bound men from taking

George Grant, 'A Platitude,' in Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi 1969), 137-43.
Used with permission.
 Intimations of Deprival 449

their fate into their own hands. This may be the case. What we lost may
have been bad for men. But this does not change the fact that some-
thing has been lost. Call them what you will - superstitions or systems of
meaning, taboos or sacred restraints - it is true that most Western men
have been deprived of them.
It might also be said that the older systems of meanings have simply
been replaced by a new one. The enchantment of our souls by myth,
philosophy, or revelation has been replaced by a more immediate
meaning - the building of the society of free and equal men by the
overcoming of chance. For it is clear that the systematic interference
with chance was not simply undertaken for its own sake but for the real-
ization of freedom. Indeed, it was undertaken partly in the name of
that charity which was held as the height in one of those ancient sys-
tems of meaning. The fulfilment that many find in the exploration of
space is some evidence that the spirit of conquest may now be liberated
from any purpose beyond itself, since such exploration bears no rela-
tion to the building of freedom and equality here on earth. What we
are can be seen in the degree to which the celebration of the accom-
plishments in space is not so much directed to the value of what has
actually been done, but rather to the way this serves as verification of
the continuing meaning in the modern drive to the future, and the pos-
sibility of noble deeds within that drive. Be that as it may, the building
of the universal and homogeneous state is not in itself a system of
meaning in the sense that the older ones were. Even in its realization,
people would still be left with a question, unanswerable in its own
terms: how do we know what is worth doing with our freedom? In myth,
philosophy, and revelation, orders were proclaimed in terms of which
freedom was measured and defined. As freedom is the highest term in
the modern language, it can no longer be so enfolded. There is there-
fore no possibility of answering the question: freedom for what pur-
poses? Such may indeed be the true account of the human situation: an
unlimited freedom to make the world as we want in a universe indiffer-
ent to what purposes we choose. But if our situation is such, then we do
not have a system of meaning.
All coherent languages beyond these which serve the drive to unlim-
ited freedom through technique have been broken up in the coming
to be of what we are. Therefore, it is impossible to articulate publicly
any suggestion of loss, and perhaps even more frightening, almost
impossible to articulate it to ourselves. We have been left with no
450 The Beautiful and the Good

words which cleave together and summon out of uncertainty the good
of which we may sense the dispossession. The drive to the planetary
technical future is in any case inevitable; but those who would try to
divert, to limit, or even simply to stand in fear before some of its appli-
cations find themselves defenceless, because of the disappearance of
any speech by which the continual changes involved in that drive could
ever be thought as deprivals. Every development of technique is an
exercise of freedom by those who develop it, and as the exercise of
freedom is the only meaning, the changes can only be publicly known
as the unfolding of meaning.
I am not speaking of those temporary deficiencies which we could
overcome by better calculations - e.g. cleverer urbanologists - failures
of the system which may be corrected in its own terms. Nor do I mean
those recognitions of deprivation from the dispossessed - either
amongst us or in the southern hemisphere - who are conscious of what
they have not got and believe their lack can be overcome by the
humane extension of the modern system.
Also, in listening for the intimations of deprival either in ourselves or
others we must strain to distinguish between differing notes: those acci-
dental deprivals which tell us only of the distortions of our own psychic
and social histories, and those which suggest the loss of some good
which is necessary to man as man. As I have said elsewhere, thought is
not the servant of psycho-analysis or sociology; but a straining for puri-
fication has the authority of the Delphic 'know thyself,' and of the fact
that for Socrates the opposite of knowledge was madness. The darkness
of the rational animal requires therapy, and now that 'philosophy' sees
itself as analysis, men who desire to think must include in their thinking
those modern therapies which arose outside any connection with what
was once called philosophy. This inclusion of what may be health-
giving in psychoanalysis and sociology will be necessary, even within the
knowledge that these therapies are going to be used unbridledly as ser-
vants of the modern belief that socially useful patterns of behaviour
should be inculcated by force. Anything concerning sexuality will serve
as an example of the distortions I am trying to describe, because such
matters touch every element of fantasy and the unconscious in our-
selves, so that judgments about good are there most clouded by idiosyn-
cracy. For example, if a man were to say that the present technical
advances were so detaching sexuality from procreation as to deprive
women of a maternity necessary to their fullest being, his statement
might be suspect as coming from a hatred of women which could not
 Intimations of Deprival 451

bear to see them free. To take an example from myself, a sophisticated

and lucid sociologist has asserted that I was saddened at the disappear-
ance of the Canadian nation into the American empire, not because of
my written reasons from political philosophy but because of my bio-
graphically determined situation. I belonged to a class which had its
place in the old Canada and could find no place for itself in the new
imperial structure. Or again, I know that my thinking about modern
liberalism is touched by a certain animus arising from tortured
instincts, because of the gynarchy in which I came to know that liberal-
ism. Thought may first arise from the ambiguities of personal history
but if it is to stand fairly before the enormous ambiguities of the
dynamo, it must attempt to transcend the recurring distortions of per-
sonal history. To listen for the intimations of deprival requires attempt-
ing a distinction between our individual history and any account which
might be possible of what belongs to man as man.
Yet even as one says this, the words fade. The language of what
belongs to man as man has long since been disintegrated. Have we not
been told that to speak of what belongs to man as man is to forget that
man creates himself in history? How can we speak of excellences which
define the height for man, because what one epoch calls an excellence
another does not, and we can transcend such historical perspectives
only in the quantifiable? Aren't such excellences just a crude way of
talking about values, pretending that they have some status in the
nature of things beyond our choosing? We are back where we began: all
languages of good except the language of the drive to freedom have
disintegrated, so it is just to pass some antique wind to speak of goods
that belong to man as man. Yet the answer is also the same: if we cannot
so speak, then we can either only celebrate or stand in silence before
that drive. Only in listening for the intimations of deprival can we live
critically in the dynamo.
Whether there are intimations of essential deprivals which are
beyond elimination by the calculations of the present spirit is just what
must remain ambiguous for us, because the whole of our dominating
system of thought denies that there could be such. When we sense their
arising, at the same time we doubt that which we sense. But even among
some of those who use the language of sheer freedom as protest, there

Rod Crook, 'Loyalism, Technology and Canada's Fate,' Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 5
(1970) 50-60.
452 The Beautiful and the Good

seems to be heard something different than the words allow. Because

they have been taught no language but the modern, they use it not only
to insist that the promises of the modern be fulfilled, but also to express
their anguish at its denials.
Any intimations of authentic deprival are precious, because they are
the ways through which intimations of good, unthinkable in the public
terms, may yet appear to us. The affirmation stands: How can we think
deprivation unless the good which we lack is somehow remembered?
To reverse the platitude, we are never more sure that air is good for ani-
mals than when we are gasping for breath. Some men who have
thought deeply seem to deny this affirmation: but I have never found
any who, in my understanding of them, have been able, through the
length and breadth of their thought, to make the language of good sec-
ondary to freedom. It is for this reason that men find it difficult to take
despair as the final stance in most circumstances. Deprivation can
indeed become absolute for any of us under torture or pain or in cer-
tain madnesses. We can be so immersed in the deprival that we are
nothing but deprivation. Be that as it may, if we make the affirmation
that the language of good is inescapable under most circumstances, do
we not have to think its content? The language of good is not then a
dead language, but one that must, even in its present disintegration, be
re-collected, even as we publicly let our freedom become ever more
increasingly the pure will to will.
We know that this re-collection will take place in a world where only
catastrophe can slow the unfolding of the potentialities of technique.
We cannot know what those potentialities will be. I do not simply mean
specific possibilities — for example, whether housework will be done by
robots, how far we can get in space, how long we can extend the life
span, how much we can eliminate socially undesirable passions, in what
ways we can control the procreation of the race, etc., etc. Some of these
possibilities we can predict quite clearly, others we cannot, or not yet.
But what is more important, we cannot know what these particular pos-
sibilities tell us about the potential in the human and the non-human.
We do not know how unlimited are the potentialities of our drive to
create ourselves and the world as we want it. For example, how far will
the race be able to carry the divided state which characterizes individu-
als in modernity: the plush patina of hectic subjectivity lived out in the
iron maiden of an objectified world inhabited by increasingly objectifi-
able beings? When we are uncertain whether anything can mediate
that division, how can we predict what men will do when the majority
 Death as Absence 453

lives more fully in that division? Is there some force in man which will
rage against such division: rage not only against a subjectivity which cre-
ates itself, but also against our own lives being so much at the disposal
of the powerful objectifications of other freedoms? Neither can we
know what this unfolding potentiality tells us of the non-human. As we
cannot now know to what extent the non-human can in practice be
made malleable to our will, therefore we also do not know what this
undetermined degree of malleability will tell us of what the non-human
is. Is the non-human simply stuff at our disposal, or will it begin to make
its appearance to us as an order the purposes of which somehow resist
our malleablizings? Are there already signs of revolts in nature?
Despite the noblest modern thought, which teaches always the exal-
tation of potentiality above all that is, has anyone been able to show us
conclusively throughout a comprehensive account of both the human
and non-human things, that we must discard the idea of a presence
above which potentiality cannot be exalted? In such a situation of
uncertainty, it would be lacking in courage to turn one's face to the
wall, even if one can find no fulfilment in working for or celebrating
the dynamo. Equally it would be immoderate and uncourageous and
perhaps unwise to live in the midst of our present drive, merely working
in it and celebrating it and not also listening or watching or simply wait-
ing for intimations of deprival which might lead us to see the beautiful
as the image, in the world, of the good.

DEATH AS ABSENCE

Jelte Kuipers was a graduate student who showed promise. The Grants attended
in short succession his wedding and his funeral. This appreciation, written for the
McMaster student newspaper, shows one of the reasons why Grant was respected
as a great teacher: his profound respect for and understanding of his students.

Jelte Kuipers - An Appreciation (1970)

Individual life is always the loser in nature. Because human beings are

George Grant, 'felte Kuipers-An Appreciation,' Silhouette,, 2 October 1970, 6.

454 The Beautiful and the Good

self-conscious, the apprehension of this is a startling presence, even

when the death concerned has been long expected and comes at the
end of a natural span. But when death comes for the young - a child
before his parents, a young man who has only begun the course - death
appears unnatural and therefore more terrible. When the young death
is that of a noble person (in origin the words noble and beautiful mean
the same) then there is a deep revolt against the fact of death - against
its waste and seeming uselessness.
Jelte Kuipers, who was a graduate student at McMaster, was killed this
August in a motor accident at the age of twenty-five. Love is the way we
glimpse the actual and potential beauty in other people. It is therefore
good at the time of revolt against the waste of his death, to remember
what it was about him that made those who knew him apprehend him
as beautiful.
At an early age Kuipers had come into a manhood which knew there
were good and evil purposes in human life, and knew also that our
present society (Canada in particular and the Western world in gen-
eral) has for a long time been promoting amongst us those destructive
purposes which frustrate the fullness of humanity. In the last decade it
has not been difficult for young North Americans to face the negations
of our society, in the war we have been waging, in the banality of the
society we are building from the fruits of imperialism, and now also in
the destruction of the very nature of which we are a part. But many can-
not pass to any vision of good underlying the destructive present. At a
very early age Kuipers passed beyond this negative bind, so that he saw
that any vision of the barrenness is only valuable when it is the occasion
for searching through to the noble roots of human existing. Because he
saw the emptiness of resting in negation even in a time of negation, one
can say that he had come upon his manhood.
Yet he had looked at the negation unflinchingly so that the positive
he asserted was not simply a set of banal platitudes. He had watched his
North American society as it pressed its patterns on the individuals and
institutions of which he was part. Knowing those patterns for what they
were, he could resist their shaping of his own life and the lives of those
who depended upon him. He had come to see the universities (includ-
ing his own) as places where vast numbers of the young were kept off
the labour market in kindergartens, and filled with trivia. Yet that vision
did not turn him from hoping that the university might be the place
where human beings would have time to think about the most impor-
tant matters. In the last years he had turned from the immediate nega-
 Death as Absence 455

tions of our institutions to see the central issue of our society in the
deep questioning of ecology. The greatest negation for him was the
dynamism of our conquest of the planet - a conquest which has
become so total that it threatens the very possibility of life for man in
that environment of which he is a part. The recognition of this nega-
tion above all brought him from youth to an early maturity.
He was brought to maturity in the face of that terrible vision because
he was able not to be swallowed up in that world of shifting personal
relations and of drugs (that is, the world of 'democratic' existentialism)
which has become the private retreat for so many of his generation.
Nor on the other side was he content with the reaction of marxism
because he saw clearly that much of the protest advocated was just part
of the system, and that the call to revolution in marxism had at its heart
a further extension of the modernity which has brought us where we
are. Because he had watched carefully, he had seen early that the crisis
of Western society was too total to be met by any 'ad hoc' solutions. It
needed a repossession of the roots of heaven through a deep under-
standing of nature and what is beyond nature. It was because of this
that he turned to the understanding and production of Greek drama,
and to the study of what was great in the ancient near east. It was
because of this that he could at the end of a short life become part of
the Roman Catholic Church. Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, etiam eis
auferetur verbum hominis.
The desire to partake through thought in the roots of wisdom did
not, however, turn him away from the practical world to a life of easy
solitude. In his impatience with injustice and his involvement in the
practical there could be seen his debt to the long line of Calvinist for-
bears in Holland. He knew clearly that the thought of those who have
not the courage to deal with the world is bound to become sterile and
even vacuous. He had learnt the lesson of the founder of philosophy
(repeated by its practitioners from Socrates to Wittgenstein) that phi-
losophy is not a value-free, analytical game, but a study which can only
be grasped as its truths are lived out in the world. Just before his death,
Kuipers had decided to put aside his studies in religion and to devote
himself to working full-time with those groups of people in Canada who
are determined to try to stop the pollution of nature. He would have
brought to that activity all the sharp determined will which was part of

They that have despised the Word of God, from them shall the word of man also be
taken away (as translated by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength, 224).
456 The Beautiful and the Good

his manhood. He had made that decision because he believed that he

had no right to proceed with his own studies at a time when the very
possibility of natural life was so obviously threatened. In the year before
that decision, he had spent most of his time at the McMaster Board of
Publications, drawing and writing and editing a series of papers to
arouse people against pollution. His death came just as he was to
embark (with all the assistance his wife would have given him) into the
public world to help in the mobilization of this country against the
enormous continental forces dedicated to the destruction of nature.
He was not leaving the studies which fascinated him because of any
optimism that he was taking on a winning cause. He was not touched by
the modern blasphemy about being on the side of history (that is, the
side of worldly success). But he knew that for many men at many times,
it is necessary to keep certain flags flying even when it is likely that that
flag will finally go down before the superior public forces of unreason.
As those who knew him think now of his sudden accidental death,
and contemplate what he might have done and been, a sense of unex-
plainable waste must be present. Why in the midst of so much folly and
vacuity should a beautiful young man be taken away, as if it were by
chance? Yet in that presence we must remember that we have also been
told: 'The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God and no tor-
ment shall touch them.'

THE ABSENCE OF JUSTICE

Although it might seem strange to have an article on torture in a section entitled

'The Beautiful and the Good,' we include it here because it illustrates so clearly
Grant's belief that it is sometimes much easier to feel the presence of the good as
justice when it is absent, and there is no justice at all in torture, particularly in
the torture of the innocent.

Torture (1977)

Torture is obviously the central crime against justice. Justice is render-

ing others their due. The shattering of the moral will by the systematic
George Grant, review of Amnesty International's The First Torturer's Trial 1975, Globe and
Mail, 11 June 1977,41.
 The Absence of Justice 457

infliction of pain is the most complete denial that anything is due to

human beings. Indeed, justice is affirmed in the fact that all of us, when
we suffer injustice, cry from the centre of our souls that this is not our
due. And this cry must never ring more terribly than from those who
endure sustained torture. When I have met people who have so
endured there is always a grim distance in their eyes which is the recog-
nition that they have suffered the inexcusable. Clearly torture is most
unjust when it is employed by the state. Yet it is a useful means for any
government. Therefore, as torture is at the same time both useful and
a crime againstjustice, its control is a continuing problem. As its limita-
tion must always be difficult of achievement, the proper means towards
that limitation is one of the key questions of political philosophy.
The present volume is an account of the trial in 1975 of thirty-two
Greek military police officers and soldiers on charges of acts of torture,
carried out under the rule of Greece by the junta of colonels from 1967
to 1974. It is an appalling account. As torture is the temptation of all
governments, it is well to read this record as to what takes place when a
government overtly throws away limitations upon what it is permitted to
do. The record of this trial is of particular significance, because it is rare
in our era for regimes which have indulged in massive torture to have
then been brought down, so that their record could be exposed to the
light of day.
Most torture in the modern world takes place under regimes which
are not likely to be brought down. In this case the regime fell because
of its folly towards Archbishop Makarios, and therefore its crimes have
been exposed. Decent people owe Amnesty International a debt for
presenting an English record of this trial about what happens when a
regime finds it useful to put aside limitations upon torture. It is an
exemplary document which should be read by students and teachers in
our law faculties and police academies, as an example of what above all
needs to be politically avoided, and as a preparation for thought as to
how such avoidance is achieved.
Who were responsible? As torture should be forbidden against any-
body, whether they be 'fascists' or 'communists' or whatever, this is a
much more important question than who were the victims. At the top
were the leaders of the junta who were faced by problems of the great-
est political difficulty. They lived in a society on the edge of the East-
West conflict; they were nationalists who envisaged their opponents as

Makarios III (1913-77), archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, elected presi-
dent of Cyprus iu 1959, 1968, aud 1973.
458 The Beautiful and the Good

betraying their country to a foreign empire. They believed that a high

level of public order was necessary if they were to modernize their
country quickly without it losing its national traditions. From this they
were led into the belief, so prevalent in all the varying forms of modern
thought, namely that if one's ends are good, one has the right to
achieve them by any means.
Underneath the leaders were the officers who were actually responsi-
ble for these abominations. From this report one gets the sense that
when 'political necessities' unleash torture, there is a natural tendency
for those who get pleasure from the infliction of pain to gravitate to
where these methods of investigation and prosecution are taking place.
The attempt to limit this terrible tendency is therefore one of the key
responsibilities of those who are the final guardians of law and order in
any society.
At the lowest level were the soldiers who carried out orders from
their officers; this was for me the greatest point of tragedy in the report.
Young conscripts were trained to be torturers by having been them-
selves tortured, in their training. Always the plea in court was that those
responsible were just carrying out orders, and indeed, blame is a quite
inadequate response to such a report. Blame is generally the language
of self-righteousness when it comes from people in our easier situation.
The essential lesson of this report cannot be blame, but rather the
necessity that those responsible for investigation and prosecution and
punishment in any society should be educated as to what actions are
impermissible, and why they are impermissible, and should be aware
that they are open to prosecution when they pass beyond the limits of
the permissible.
In Canada, which may be moving towards more stringent necessities,
care about such education has become a priority. In highly advanced
societies, public decency depends above all on the medical, legal, and
police professions. Their religious education is the central core of the
control of torture. One cannot be optimistic about that core, because
of the weakness of such education in these professions. This education
is the sustaining force behind formal constitutional guarantees.
In the twentieth century, discussion of torture has been too often car-
ried on within the framework of ideology. People of the 'left' affirm
that torture is a phenomenon of the 'right,' and will disappear as pro-
gressive regimes arise. People of the 'right' concentrate on the extrem-
ities of the communists, and gloss over their own extremities. In the
'democratic' world it is often implied that we have passed beyond tor-
 The Absence of Justice 459

ture, and that it is only a phenomenon of non-democratic regimes.

Such ideological talk makes people forget that torture is a political
problem at all times and places. In the modern era it is returning not
only in its old form but in new forms. The quick changes and expan-
sions consequent on technology make the maintenance of public order
difficult, and torture is an invitingly useful instrument. At a subtler
level, the central driving force of our society is the science which puts
nature 'to the question,' and why should that 'putting to the question'
stop with non-human nature, when it is useful or convenient to control
human beings? Despite the advantages of our English-speaking consti-
tutional systems, all kinds of new forms of social control are arising
which verge on torture or are directly torture. The growth of depro-
gramming in North America is a simple example. Our torture of non-
human species grows and is taken for granted.
Beyond the pressing needs of practice, thoughtful human beings are
ceaselessly torn by the contradiction between the perfection of God
and the misery of man. Torture is the height of that misery. The fact
that the central symbol of Christianity is an instrument of torture has
made that religion the supreme way of contemplating that contradic-
tion. But one must think about it in the realities of injustice which are
going on now. Amnesty International does a notable service in oppos-
ing torture in whatever regime it arises. One aspect of that opposition is
bringing out books such as this which keep the reality before us.

BLISS

Of all his colleagues at McMaster, Grant felt closest to those who studied Hindu-
ism. His understanding of the meaning of the Gospels was informed not just by
Plato but also by what he had learned from Indian religion.

We can never touch in one's writings these moments of miraculous power and
glory- reasonless and triumphant. They just come; it is as if one had seen a
wonderful plumed bird. Katherine Mansfield gets the idea best in that story
'Bliss,' but how could one ever describe the deep and real warmth of feeling

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), New Zealand writer, author of Bliss: And Other Stones
(1920).
460 The Beautiful and the Good

one feels for Bare? It is not just sentimental, but based on the thousand inci-
dents of growing up. 'Oh love that interests itself in thoughtless heaven.'
- George Grant, Journal Entry, 1942

Foreword to Neo-Vedanta and Modernity (1983)'

To a Westerner such as myself, uneducated in the truth of the Vedanta

but with knowledge of what has happened to Christianity in the face of
the modern, Dr Mukerji's [book is] of the greatest interest. I am not
qualified to speak with authority on Indian thought, but having read
these chapters with close attention I can affirm that Dr Mukerji's argu-
ment is beautifully expounded. The thesis of that argument is that the
impact of Westernization on Indian thought has resulted in obscuring
what was meant by 'bliss' in the Vedanta, and therefore distorting that
philosophy ...
Above all, what is particularly wonderful in Dr Mukerji's book is her
enucleation of the ontology of Ananda. This is breathtaking for any
Western listener. How right it is that the word Ananda be translated as
bliss. The word 'joy' would be too subjective and miss the knowledge
that what is spoken of here concerns Being. What has come to be in the
dynamic civilization of North America — indeed, in all these societies
which express in themselves the thoughts of Locke and Marx, Rousseau
or Darwin or Hume - is the restless search for bliss, which escapes one
because it cannot be known as being itself. Modern life has become the
joyless pursuit of joy. One of the truly great stories of the English-speak-
ing world is called Bliss. (It is also written by a woman, Katherine Mans-
field.) The story recognizes beautifully the crying need that bliss be
more than the subjectivity of feeling but rooted in the Being of beings.
What is more pressing for us Westerners than the understanding that
there is an ontology of bliss? That this should be unthinkable is perhaps
the greatest price that we have paid for modernity. For those of us who
are Christians, it is the elimination of the understanding of the Trinity
as bliss, which leaves Christianity floundering in the midst of the
modernity it so much made. What is sad in the Western world is the
deep desire to participate in bliss, for instance through the detached
pursuit of the orgasm, which because it is outside any ontological
Sarah Barclay, the Grants' housekeeper.
George Grant, 'Foreword,' in Bithika Mukerji, Neo-Vedanta and Modernity (Varanasi:
Ashutosh Prakashan Sansthan 1983), iii-vi.
 Love 461

understanding of bliss results in the good of the pursuit often being

blackly negated.

LOVE

Grant began work on this essay about 1977 and produced several versions of it
before the final one appeared in Technology and Justice. It is a difficult essay
because it deals with the absence of love in modern technological society, a great
subject in a small space.

Faith and the Multiversity (1986)

'Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department!'

- Lord Rutherford

'Faith and the multiversity' is a subject which could be tackled from

many angles, both practical and theoretical. The essence of the issues
is, however, the relation between faith and modern science. It might be
maintained that there has already been enough discussion of this over
the last centuries. I do not agree. Thought has not yet reached the core
of that relation. Many Christians turn away from the relation because
they want there to be no conflict here. Nevertheless, it remains fate-
filled with conflict.
It is important to be clear what is meant by the multiversity, particu-
larly because it is an institution which has realized itself in Europe and
North America only in the last half of this century - although its com-
ing to be was a slow emergence over the last four centuries. I often meet
people of my generation who went to university in the 1930s, and who
speak as if the institutions their children or grandchildren are now
attending are really the same as those they went to. But this is simply an
illusion. The names are the same, but they are such different places
that they should have different names. To say what they now are, it is
necessary to describe the dominating paradigm of knowledge which
rules them and determines what they are.
George Grant, 'Faith and the Multiversity,' in Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of
Anansi 1986), 35. Used with permission.
462 The Beautiful and the Good

Different civilizations have different paradigms of knowledge, and

such paradigms shape every part of the society. The principle of any
paradigm in any civilization is always the relation between an aspiration
of human thought and the effective conditions for its validation.
The question then becomes what is given in the modern use of the
word 'science.' This is the paradigm which has slowly reached defini-
tion over the last centuries, and has since 1945 come to its apogee of
determining power over our institutions. Of course, it would be folly to
attempt to summarize in a paragraph the results of that brilliant
progress of self-definition by philosophic scientists.
Suffice it simply to say that what is given in the modern paradigm is
the project of reason to gain objective knowledge. What is meant by
objective? Object means literally some thing that we have thrown over
against ourselves. Jacio I throw, ob over against; therefore, 'the thrown
against.' The German word for object is Gegenstand ~ that which stands
against. Reason as project (that is, reason as thrown forth) is the sum-
monsing of something before us and the putting of questions to it, so
that it is forced to give its reasons for being the way it is as an object.
Our paradigm is that we have knowledge when we represent anything
to ourselves as object, and question it, so that it will give us its reasons.
That summonsing and questioning requires well-defined procedures.
These procedures are what we call in English 'experimental research,'
although what is entailed in these is more clearly given in the German
word Forschung. Often people in the university like to use about them-
selves the more traditional word 'scholar,' but that word means now
those who carry on 'research.' Those procedures started with such
experiments as balls running down an inclined plane, but now the
project of reason applies them to everything: stones, plants, human
and non-human animals. Thus in North America we have divided our
institutions of higher learning into faculties of natural science, social
science and humanities, depending on the object which is being
researched. But the project of reason is largely the same, to summons
different things to questioning.
In the case of the humanities the object is the past, and these proce-
dures are applied to the relics of the past. For example, I have lived in
a department of religion in which much work was done to summons
the Bible before the researchers to give them its reasons. Each depart-
ment of these institutions, indeed almost each individual researcher,
carries on the project of reason by approaching different objects. The
limitations of the human mind in synthesizing facts necessitates the
 Love 463

growing division of research into differing departments and further

subdivisions. This paradigm of knowledge makes it therefore appropri-
ate to speak of the multiversity.
The achievements of the modern project are of course a source of
wonder. The world as object has indeed given forth its reasons, as it has
been summonsed to do over the last centuries. The necessities that we
now can know about stones or societies surely produce in us astonish-
ment. These achievements are not simply practical, but also have theo-
retical consequences. All of us in our everyday lives are so taken up with
certain practical achievements, in medicine, in production, in the mak-
ing of human beings and the making of war, that we are apt to forget
the sheer theoretical interest of what has been revealed about necessity
in modern physics or biology.
My purpose is to discuss the relation of this paradigm of knowledge
to faith. 'Faith' is one of the central words of Western thought which
has had many meanings. What I intend by it is Simone Weil's defini-
tion: 'Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by
love.' Such a sentence, of course, simply moves one from the uncer-
tainty of 'faith' to the even greater complexity of the word 'love.' Obvi-
ously this word has been used to cover a multitude of disparate
meanings. Heidegger has used the beautiful metaphor that language is
the house of being. In our epigonal times that house has become a lab-
yrinth. Nowhere are we more in that labyrinth than when we try to sort
out the relation between such words as 'love,' 'desire,' 'appetite,' etc. I
cannot attempt that sorting out here, but will simply express what I
think is given in the word 'love' in the sentence about faith.
What is first intended is that love is consent to the fact that there is
authentic otherness. We all start with needs, and with dependence on
others to meet them. As we grow up, self-consciousness brings the ten-
dency to make ourselves the centre, and with it the common sense
understanding that the very needs of survival depend on our own
efforts. These facts push us in the direction of egocentricity. When life
becomes dominated by self-serving, the reality of otherness, in its own
being, almost disappears for us. In sexual life, where most of us make
some contact with otherness, there is yet a tendency to lose sight of it,
so that we go on wanting things from others just as we fail to recognize
their authentic otherness. In all the vast permutations and combina-
tions of sexual desire the beauty of otherness is both present and
absent. Indeed, the present tendency for sexual life and family to be
held apart is frightening, because for most people children have been
464 The Beautiful and the Good

the means whereby they were presented with unequivocal otherness. In

political terms, Plato places the tyrant as the worst human being
because his self-serving has gone to the farthest point. He is saying that
the tyrant is mad because otherness has ceased to exist for him. I can
grasp with direct recognition the theological formulation of this: 'Hell
is to be one's own.
The old teaching was that we love otherness, not because it is other,
but because it is beautiful. The beauty of others was believed to be an
experience open to everyone, though in extraordinarily different
forms, and at differing steps towards perfection. It was obviously capa-
ble of being turned into strange channels because of the vicissitudes of
our existence. The shoe fetishist, the farmer, and St John of the Cross
were on the same journey, but at different stages. The beauty of other-
ness is the central assumption in the statement, 'Faith is the experience
that the intelligence is enlightened by love.'
Nevertheless, any statement about the beauty of the world is so easily
doubted in our era, because it appears meaningless within the domi-
nant language of modern science. Our uses of 'beauty' have been radi-
cally subjectivist. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' (But what then
is beholding?) At the simplest level it is said that the sentence, 'We love
otherness because it is beautiful,' is tautologous, because beauty is
already defined as what we love. Our loves are determined by the vast
varieties of necessities and chances which have constituted our desire,
and these could 'ideally' be explained by behaviourial psychotherapists
and sociologists. The fact that I call 'beautiful' the curves and lights of
rock and sea in a North Atlantic bay can be explained by my particular
'psyche,' with its particular ancestors. I remember taking the American
explorer and scientist, Stefansson, to that bay and saying: 'A hard coun-
try, but beautiful.' His response was to say how misleading it was to use
such subjective language about terrain, and he proceeded to give me a
lecture on modern geology and the modern discovery of 'objectivity.'
In all scientific explanations we are required to eliminate the assump-
tion of the other as itself beautiful. The Platonic language which asserts
that the world is beautiful and love is the appropriate response to it is
believed to be based on a fundamental assumption of trust, because
Plato was too early in the history of the race to have a proper scientific
understanding of subjects and objects. That trust was shown to be a
naive starting point by those who formulated doubt as the methodolog-
ical prerequisite of an exact science.
Indeed, the language of 'subjects' and 'objects' is one of the ways
 Love 465

through which the beauty of the world has been obscured for us. This
language was of theoretical use in the corning to be of technological
science; one of its prices, however, was to obscure beauty. To state the
literal meaning of 'objects' yet once again: it speaks of anything which
is held away from us for our questioning. Any beautiful thing can be
made into an object by us and for us and we can analyze it so that it will
give us its reasons as an object. But if we confine our attention to any
thing as if it were simply an object, it cannot be loved as beautiful. This
is well illustrated in the division between useful and non-useful criti-
cism by professors of literature and music who explicate the texts of
works of art. For example, many such explications of Shakespeare or
Mozart add to our understanding of the works concerned. But one
central way of dividing the useful from the non-useful among such crit-
icisms is the recognition by the critic that his work is a means to an
end, which is the further understanding of the beauty of what is being
studied.
When such writing appears stultifying, it is that the critic has stood
over the thing studied and therefore the thing has remained an object.
Its objectivity has not been a passing means but an end. (It may be said
in parenthesis that such failed works often seem to appear because the
professors concerned want to share the prestige of objectivity with their
colleagues from the mastering sciences.) Only as anything stands
before us in some relation other than the objective can we learn of its
beauty and from its beauty. To say this may seem no more than a lin-
guistic trick upon the use of the word 'objective.' But this is not so. The
language of 'subject' and 'object' can easily suffocate our recognition
of the beauty of the world. In stating that the beauty of otherness is the
central assumption in the aphorism 'Faith is the experience that the
intelligence is enlightened by love,' it is necessary to bring into con-
sciousness the sheer power of the contemporary language of 'subjects'
and 'objects,' so that the statement is not killed by that language.
Indeed, the central difficulty of using the language of beauty and
love, in the affirmation that one knows more about something in loving
it, is that in that language beauty was known as an image of goodness
itself. Yet through the modern paradigm of knowledge the conception
of good has been emptied into uncertainty. The first stage of this emp-
tying was when good came to be used simply in discourse about human
ethical questions. In the last century the emptying has gone farther.
'Good' has largely been replaced in our ethical discourse by the word
'value.' The modern emptying of 'good' can indeed be seen in the
466 The Beautiful and the Good

emptiness of its replacement. Even its chief philosophic originator,

Nietzsche, has not been able to tell us what a value is. This vagueness
has resulted in the word generally being used now in the plural - our
'values.'
At a time when the word 'good' has been so emptied of content by
the modern paradigm of knowledge, it is necessary to proceed hesi-
tantly in trying to say what it meant in relation to our love of the beau-
tiful. It must first be stated that what was given traditionally in the word
'good' was not confined to Christians. The majority in the classical
Mediterranean tradition would have so used it - Epicureanism being
then a minority. A similar conception is in the Vedanta. Christianity's
particular call was not to this language, but to the fact that Christ
declares the price of goodness in the face of evil.
In the old language 'good' means what any being is fitted for. It is a
good of animals to breathe; we are not if we do not. The good of a
being is what it is distinctively fitted for. Human beings are fitted to live
well together in communities and to try to think openly about the
nature of the whole. We are fitted for these activities because we are dis-
tinguished from the other animals in being capable of rational lan-
guage. In living well together or being open to the whole in thought we
are fulfilling the purpose which is given us in being human, not some
other type of animal. Good is what is present in the fulfilment of our
given purposes. To avoid the modern view of temporality as futurity I
use a different example. A child is good, not only as a preparation, but
insofar as it is at all. One loves children for what they are now. In this
sense the Western word 'good' appears close to what the Vedanta
means by the word 'ananda' (bliss) - not as a feeling, but as being itself.
At the heart of the Platonic language is the affirmation - so incredi-
ble to nearly everyone at one time or another - that the ultimate cause
of being is beneficence. This affirmation was made by people who, as
much as anybody, were aware of suffering, war, torture, disease, starva-
tion, madness, and the cruel accidents of existing. But it was thought
that these evils could only be recognized for what they were if they were
seen as deprivations of good. (It must be remembered that in this
account of good and evil the verb 'to be' is used differently from the
way it is employed in most educated modern parlance.)
Clearly this language of the given goodness of what is must be a lan-
guage founded upon trust. The archetypal expositor of this language,
Socrates, knew that doubt was a necessary means to philosophy. But The
Republic makes clear that such doubt is within the overreaching assump-
 Love 467

tion of trust. We start with trust in our knowledge of those things we are
presented with immediately, and doubt is the means of moving to an
understanding of what makes possible that trust in an educated human
being. The identity of doubt and systematic thought which lies in the
origin of the modern experiment was not present in Socrates's enter-
prise. The modern assertion that what we are is best expressed as
'beings towards death' would certainly have been in Socrates's mind in
what he said at the time of his execution. But it was not for him the final
word about what we are. At the moment when his death was immediate
he made clear that we are beings towards good. It was indeed for this
reason that in the scene of his death, Socrates asserts that the absence
of knowledge of good is not ignorance but madness.
The central cause of the modern emptying of the word 'good' is that
the new technological scientist defined the scopes and method of their
activity in terms of their criticism of the old Aristotelian science, which
had described things through the conception of purpose. The modern
understanding of things in terms of necessity and chance, through
algebraic method, has led not only to our conquest of nature, but to an
understanding of things outside the idea of purpose. The successes of
this method are a source of wonder (use the synonym 'admiration' if
you will) to any sane person.
The new science (however one may sometimes flinch at what it says)
had some appeal to certain Christians, in the very fact that it had
defined itself against the ideological science of medieval Aristotelian-
ism. When this science was used unwisely by official Christianity, in the
name of ecclesiastical power, to assert that purpose in nature pointed
to an overriding purpose given for the universe as a whole, it is under-
standable why many turned away from a science so triumphally used.
The more representable the purpose of the whole was said to be, the
more this natural theology became a trivializing, a blasphemy against
the cross. Some of the most depressing episodes in Christian history
have been the spilling of much silly ink to show that the universe as a
whole vouchsafed a representable purpose of design analogous to the
way that the purpose of the automaker is given in the design of the
automobile.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that faith cannot turn away from the idea
of good. Faith affirms that all that is, proceeds from beneficence. If
faith is said to be the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by
love, and love is said to be the apprehension of otherness as beautiful,
then the question must arise whether this definition is not the kind of
468 The Beautiful and the Good

blasphemy of which I have been writing. Is it not saying that the beauty
of the world gives us a representable purpose for the whole? Is it not
just the kind of distortion which turns us from the facts of the world so
that we seem able to affirm what is contradicted by the evident experi-
ence of living? Through it are we not led to assert that evil is good and
good is evil, and so lose what is essential to any love of truth - namely
the continual recognition that the world is as it is?
In writing about love of beauty, it is therefore necessary to say some-
thing of how the language of good and purpose is used about the
beauty of the world without trivializing suffering. It is best to start from
works of art, for here there is obvious purposiveness in that they are
made by human beings, in some sense comparable to the automobile,
in some sense not. They are both purposive in that means are arranged
in the light of a purposed end. We can speak both of a well-made car
and a well-made concerto. But it is certainly harder to represent to our-
selves the purpose of the work of art. Certain works of art can be par-
tially understood in terms of their well-defined external purposes.
Bach's Passions were written to help believers focus their attention and
their prayers around the originating events of Christianity. But when
we turn to Bach's concerto for two violins it is less clear that we can rep-
resent its purpose.
Nowadays much of our time is filled by works of art. Their purpose is
to entertain. Entertainment is the agreeable occupation of our atten-
tion - in the sense of what we happen to like. What was spoken in the
Greek technebecame the Latin ars. Plows and plays were both made by
human beings and the making was named by the same word. In our
world the activities called technical and artistic have separated between
the practically useful and the entertaining. In both cases means are
carefully adjusted to ends to produce a good car or computer, play, or
concerto. The skillful gathering together of means for the car is for the
purpose for getting us around; in the play for the agreeable occupation
of our attention. This account is everywhere in democratic capitalistic
societies.
It is against this account of art that it is necessary to write. It stands
between us and any proper apprehension of works of art and ruins our
partaking in their beauty. The purpose of a car can be represented
rightly as a means of getting us around; the purpose of a work of art is
not properly represented as merely entertainment. Indeed, the greater
the work of art the less can its purpose be represented at all. The stag-
gered silence with which we can watch King Lear is evidence that some-
 Love 469

thing of great import is before us. Afterwards we can study it so that we

can better understand the parts in relation to the whole. Whether
watched or read, it clearly has a purpose. When we are enraptured we
can say that it seems purposiveness itself. But can we ever represent that
purpose to ourselves? Who has been able to tell us what is the purpose
of King Lear? In a certain sense the purposiveness is nothing but the
gathering together of the means employed by its author; in another
sense its purpose is present but we cannot represent it. The beautiful at
its heights gives us purposiveness but its good transcends us (oh dan-
gerous word). It is not chiefly entertainment that we have consumed
when we are consumed by great beauty.
This is well illustrated in the non-verbal and non-representational
language of music - for example, in the last piano concertos of Mozart
(let us say numbers 14 to 27.) It is clear that these are purposive in the
sense that the techniques of Italian and German music are here
supremely used. It is also clear that we partake in their purpose the
more we are able to follow the intricacies of modulation and counter-
point, and understand the unity between the three movements of each
work. We can be aware of the moods of majesty and gaiety and desola-
tion which are expressed in the music. We can also know that Mozart
needed to entertain the Austrian upper classes to make money. Enter-
tainment is occupying our attention agreeably. But with what? To some
cultures and to some people their attention is more agreeably occupied
by Rhapsody in Blue than by K.482.' This fact raises inevitably the ques-
tion : are there some works that are more worth paying attention to
than others? What is given in those that are most worthy of attention?
What is it that enraptures us about them, so that even in the desolation
of King Lear or K.491+ we are enraptured? Can we describe that enrap-
turing as the immediate engrossment in the beauty of the work, which
points to good which is quite unrepresentable?
Here indeed one must pay attention not only to looking or reading
or listening, but to the very making of such works. To do so would be a
staggering impudence, had not the activity been described by Mozart
himself.

The question is how my art proceeds in writing and working out great
and important matters. I can say no more than this, for I know no more
George Gershwin (1898-1937), piano concerto in F major, opus 2 (1924).
Mozart's piano concerto in E flat.
Mozart's piano concerto in C minor.
470 The Beautiful and the Good

and can come upon nothing further. When I am well and have good sur-
roundings, travelling in a carriage, or after a good meal or a walk or at
night when I cannot sleep, then ideas come to me best and in torrents.
Where they come from and how they come I just do not know. I keep in
my head those that please me and hum them aloud as others have told
me. When I have that all carefully in my head, the rest comes quickly, one
thing after another; I see where such fragments could be used to make a
composition of them all, by employing the rules of counterpoint and the
sound of different instruments etc. My soul is then on fire as long as I am
not disturbed; the idea expands, I develop it, all becoming clearer and
clearer. The piece becomes almost complete in my head, even if it is a
long one, so that afterwards I see it in my spirit all in one look, as one sees
a beautiful picture or beautiful human being. I am saying that in imagina-
tion I do not understand the parts one after another, in the order that
they ought to follow in the music; I understand them altogether at one
moment. Delicious moments. When the ideas are discovered and put into
a work, all occurs in me as in a beautiful dream which is quite lucid. But
the most beautiful is to understand it all at one moment. What has hap-
pened I do not easily forget and this is the best gift which our God has
given me. When it afterwards comes to writing, I take out of the bag of my
mind what had previously gathered into it. Then it gets pretty quickly put
down on paper, being strictly, as was said, already perfect, and generally
in much the same way as it was in my head before.3

The combination expressed in these words between the free work of

the artist and his receptivity allows us dimly to perceive what that won-
derful making must have been. Obviously his mastery of technique has
come from long training and attention. We know that the last piano
concertos were written after he had studied Bach, late in his short life.
His own hard work is united with his receiving of melodies and his hear-
ing of the whole piece all at one moment. Fire has always been the word
to describe love, and it has been written that flame touches flame. The
making of a beautiful piece is an act of love, a love which illuminates
the lucidity in his making of it.
Two points may be made, not to add anything to these words, but
because the dominant language in modern education may cut us off
from listening to the words. First, it has been a central theme in mod-
ern philosophy that there is no such thing as 'intellectual intuition.'
This has gone with the teaching that the great mistake of the Platonic
tradition has been the affirmation of such. 'Intuition' comes from the
 Love 471

Latin tueor, to look. When Mozart says that after composing a piece of
music he sees it 'all in one look' and when he says he understands it all
at one moment, he is surely describing an act which can properly be
named 'intellectual intuition.' Secondly, it is worth remembering when
Mozart speaks of understanding (in German the very similar word ver-
steheri) he did so at a time when Kant was exalting reason above under-
standing, in the name of his account of human being as 'autonomous.'
This was to place on its head the teaching of Plato in which understand-
ing is the height for human beings. Indeed, the English 'to understand'
and the German verstehenvtere in their origins filled with that very sense
of receptivity which Kant lessens in the name of our freedom.
Critics who write within the historicist assumptions of our time might
choose to deconstruct this letter in one way or another. They say that
Mozart's music is a different matter from his justifying explanation of
his understanding of it. At another level it might be said in languages of
modern physiology and psychology that the language of gift and the
fire of love can now be better understood for what they are than in
Mozart's 'naive' words. Indeed, with our new knowledge it may be said
that we will be able to add to the Mozartian corpus by means of the
computer. Mozart's assertion that he understood the whole of a piece
in one look and heard it all at one moment can only be wiped away if we
speak entirely within the languages of the new sciences. What has been
lost as against what has been found in the self-definition of the modern
paradigm here appears to me evident.
What can be meant by the beauty of the world becomes more ambig-
uous when we pay attention to those things which have not been made
by human beings. At a common sense level, Vice's insistence that we
understand what we have made in a way we cannot understand what we
have not made seems correct. More importantly, it is difficult to par-
take in the beauty of the world because of the misery, the hardness, the
sadness of so much of our lives, which is caused not only by the ugliness
in ourselves, but by the very conditions of the non-human world. As has
often been said, the very drive to technological science arose with the
desire to overcome these vicissitudes. The key difficulty in receiving the
beauty of the world these days is that such teaching is rooted in the act
of looking at the world as it is, while the dominant science is rooted in
the desire to change it.
I am not saying that the beauty of the world is vouchsafed above all
when untouched by human making. It would be senseless to think of
cultivated land as unbeautiful. Race horses are beautiful. Neverthe-
472 The Beautiful and the Good

less, it was possible for Canadians to admire the chthonically beautiful

places, where nature existed untouched by human making, and more-
over to see these places as beautiful even in the awareness of how rig-
orous pioneering society had been - my ancestors, for example, were
forced to eat the flesh of their dead companions to survive. In the
Western world today, fewer and fewer people can ever find nature
untouched by technological science. On His return, it may not be
understandable for Christ to repeat what He said about the lilies of
the field, because if there are any lilies they will have been improved
by human skill. For most people, animal existence appears as cats
and dogs, meat to be eaten, or wild animals protected in zoos or wil-
derness areas. The heavens, the oceans, and the mountains are as yet
only partially conquered and the heavens may be at points untouch-
able. Indeed, the beauty of the world in its primal sense is rarely
present for us, and that assertion need not depend on the ambiguous
doctrine of 'the Fall.' It is indeed necessary to call modern science
'technological' because in the modern paradigm nature is conceived
at one and the same time as algebraically understood necessity and as
resource. Anything apprehended as resource cannot be appre-
hended as beautiful. At some stages of our capitalist development,
certain rhetoricians used to say: 'Canada's greatest resource is its peo-
ple.' That well-meaning sentence expresses what has been lost as well
as found in modernity.
Of course, the beauty of the world manifests itself most intensely for
us in the beauty of other people. The manifold forms of love, for
example sexual and parental, friendship and admiration, take in each
case many forms themselves. Who could in a lifetime write down the
ways in which sexual love penetrates every moment of our conscious-
ness and is never absent in any loving of the beautiful — present even
when that love is universal?
Indeed, the manifold ways in which sexual instinct and love are held
together and detached from each other make up much of our existing.
On the one hand, sexual desire can be the recognition of others as
beautiful; on the other hand, it can be the occasion for such calculated
self-engrossment that other people are made instruments for produc-
ing sensations. Sexual desire can be the occasion when we see the
truth of what others are, in the flame of its attention; or it can lock us
in the madness of ourselves so that nothing is real but our imaginings.
So intense are the pleasures of sexuality, so pressing its needs, so
detached can the bodies of ourselves and others be from any human-
 Love 473

ity, that sexual desire can drive love out from its presence. It can
become the rock of 'reality' on which the search for the beauty of the
world founders.
In an age in which the paradigm of knowledge has no place for our
partaking in eternity, it is understandable that orgasmic fulfilment has
been made out to be the height of our existing - indeed, that which
gives our existing some kind of immanent justification. The materialists
have taken it as their heaven. But this modern union of individuality
and materialism has meant a transposition of older beliefs about the
relation of sex and love. In the older beliefs sexual desire was one
means through which love between human beings could abound; in
our era love seems sometimes to be thought of as a means for the
abounding of sexual enjoyment.
Because sexuality is such a great power and because it is a means to
love, societies in the past hedged it around with diverse and often
strange systems of restraint. Such restraints were considered sacred,
because their final justification (whatever other justifications were
present) was the love of the beautiful, and that was considered sacred.
Modern social scientists have changed the original meaning of 'taboo'
into the socially and psychologically 'forbidden,' in the attempt to
teach us that restraints are not sacred. This is of course useful to a cap-
italist society because everything must be made instrumental to the for-
warding of 'production,' and the sacred restraints cannot be made
instrumental. Social scientists follow their creator, because social sci-
ence was created by capitalist society.
It is the reversal in the hierarchy of love and sex which has led in the
modern world to the attempt to remove the relation between sexuality
and the birth of children. The love of the beauty of the world in sexual
life was believed to have some relation to the love of the beauty of the
world found in progeny. (In using the word 'some' before 'relation,' I
imply that I am not speaking against contraception.) But if orgasmic
fulfilment is the height of all existing, it has no need of such extension.
Obviously, love has to be protected by societies, because the human
condition is such that the tenderness of the flesh leaves everybody at
the terrible mercy of others. Yet at this time in 'advanced' societies, jus-
tice has been massively withdrawn from unborn children.
In the pre-progressive societies, however differently (and often per-
versely) love was brought within different orders, those loves were not
considered entirely blind, because they were the way that human beings
were moved out of self-engrossment to find joy in the world. Indeed,
474 The Beautiful and the Good

the words 'to love' and 'to know' were joined. For example, because of
the intensity and intimacy of orgasmic love, it was said when people
freely participated in it, they 'knew' each other. Love was not consid-
ered in its essence blind. It was for this reason that the family - in such
varied forms as polyandry, polygamy, monogamy, etc., -was given enor-
mous power (sometimes indeed too much) because it was believed that
in the main the family was a guardian of the interests of its members.
Indeed, one of the growing beliefs of our era is the idea that love in
its essence is blind. For people of my generation the great teacher in
matters sexual and familial was Freud. He seemed a writer who gave
sexual life its central place after the repression of the early industrial
era. But for all his concentration on love, he (like his master Nietzsche)
gave love poison to drink, because he so placed ambiguity at the centre
of love as to say that in its heart love was blind. His influence may not be
intellectually lasting. But he has been influential, particularly in North
America, in placing sexual and familial life under the hands of the
objectifiers. The 'helping' professions - psychiatrists, social workers,
etc., - are an important means of bringing people under that objective
control. This is largely done by the claim that they understand families
better than the families understand themselves.
Luckily many people are not much interested in such assumptions
and just go on loving or being indifferent or hating. But deep changes
in ways of looking at things slowly permeate, particularly in societies
whose democratic origins were bound up with the idea that philosophy
could be open to nearly everyone. Thus when a popularizer of philoso-
phy such as Sartre writes that 'hell is other people,' he makes starkly
open the modern division between love and intelligence.
The results of the division of love and intelligence are evident when
one speaks of knowledge of justice. In the older tradition, justice was
defined as rendering to anything what was its due. Political justice was
the attempt to render what was due among human beings. For our-
selves, justice was rendering what was due to every aspect of our own
being, body and soul, as we were then considered to be. In the non-
human world it was rendering the proper due to cattle and bears,
wheat and stones, to God or the gods. Justice was then not only arrange-
ments to be realized in any given society, but also a state of the individ-
ual which was called a virtue. Of course, the question arose to thought,
why is anything due to anything? Once any due had been granted, the
question came to be what was properly due to any being. Socrates shows
in his debate with Callicles in Gorgias that life demands the idea of due.
 Love 475

He then proceeds in The Republic to show how we come to know what is

due to anything.
What Christianity added to the classical account of justice was not
any change in its definition but an extension of what was due to others
and an account of how to fulfil that due. Christ added to the two great
commandments the words that the second is 'like unto' the first. At the
height of the Gospels we are shown the moment when a tortured being
says of his torturers that their due is to be forgiven. Despite all the hor-
rors perpetrated by Christians, both in the West and more particularly
outside the West, despite all the failures of Christians to understand the
consequences of justice for the law, nevertheless the rendering to each
being its due, in the light of the perfection of that rendering, could not
be publicly denied among Christians. Indeed, Christianity calls human
beings not only to the reasonable decencies of the particular purposes
and goods of this or that situation, but to be perfect as God in heaven is
perfect. There is no short cut to this perfection by a mysticism without
price. As Simone Weil says, 'Matter is our infallible judge.' Perfection is
not isolated from the immediate requirements of the world. We can
only fulfil those requirements here below insofar as we partake to some
degree in that perfection. Goods in the here and now are only good in
that they participate in goodness itself. Our freedom is just our poten-
tial indifference to such a high end.
Indeed, among all the Western criticisms of Christianity the most
substantial was that Christianity led to overextension of soul. It was said
that too much is demanded of human beings and this has made steady
political orders impossible where the Gospel was influential. The call to
perfection made difficult the handling of the necessities of the world,
and laid too grave a burden upon individuals. This criticism and the
replies to it were both made by people who accepted that justice was
rendering each being its due.
The call to perfection caused the persecution of the saints, not only
in communities alien to Christianity (e.g., in the early Roman Empire
or in modern secular empires) but in the heart of what was known as
Christendom. The call to perfected justice seemed to question the ele-
mentary justice possible in the world. The harsh imprisonment suf-
fered by St John of the Cross was administered at the hands of
churchmen because of his desire to fulfil the original Franciscan per-
fection. The intelligence's enlightenment by love is a terrible teaching
(in the literal sense of the word). Contemplate what happens to those
who have been deeply illuminated by love! After the resurrection
476 The Beautiful and the Good

Christ told Peter that he must expect to be carried 'whither he wouldst

not.' In the traditional teaching about justice it was recognized that
human nature is so constituted that any desire which has not passed
through the flesh byway of actions and settled dispositions appropriate
to it is not finally real in the soul. The saints are those in whom the
desire for justice has so passed through the flesh that it has become
transparent to justice.
The very call to perfection in Christianity has been above all that
which has made so difficult the establishment of proper systems of gov-
ernment. The compromises between the world and perfection were
particularly necessary in this area. 'Render unto Caesar the things that
are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's' is a brilliant epi-
gram, but hard to particularize. In any given society where Christianity
has been influential only few hear the call to perfection and who those
few may be is not easy to specify. Most of us make something of trying in
a half-hearted way to render others their due. Some lose all sense of
others having any due. For most of us it is easier to envisage the unrep-
resentable end for those near and dear. It is harder to envisage it even
among those in the same neighbourhood, let alone farther away. Love
of the good due to others can easily become little more than love of our
own. Saddest is when love of our own becomes no more important than
love of our own bodies and our own immediate needs.
It was recognized that the wicked were not alone the individual crim-
inals, but those who wished to rule for their own self-assertion. Such
people were more destructive of justice even than those who ruled sim-
ply in terms of the property interests of one class. They were worse than
those who climbed the slippery pole of politics to get some place of
influence. Because such tyrants were the most dangerous for any soci-
ety, the chief political purpose anywhere was to see that those who
ruled had at least some sense of justice which mitigated self-assertion.
For these reasons there were in the pre-progressive societies those
complicated systems of education wherein the truth of justice was made
central to education. Indeed, the pressing reason for this is given with
startling clarity by Socrates in Phaedrus. For most of us justice must ini-
tially appear as unattractive. Justice is not easy to be loved because it is
not, at first sight, beautiful. Socrates also says that the more we come to
love it the more we come to find it beautiful. Indeed, it has been
recounted by those advanced in the journey that justice which once
appeared ugly or tiresomely distracting comes to appear as overwhelm-
ingly beautiful.
 Love 477

As traditional societies were economically limited and therefore the

possibilities of education were directed to the few, it was to those most
likely to rule that this education was given. Among the young, the culti-
vation of habit was considered central. Justice was, in its origins, good
habit. The early practice of fulfilling some small segment of justice was
necessary to the overcoming of self-assertion among the young. For
those likely to rule this was not sufficient. It was necessary to under-
stand justice within the whole scheme of the cosmos. When one com-
pares the education of Queen Elizabeth the First, or of Gladstone, with
that given to nearly all modern rulers, one may come to understand
why they were such masters of what Plato called the highest art. Is there
anything greater in modern politics than Gladstone's attempt in his last
years to turn England back from the absurdities of expansionist impe-
rialism, which were leading directly to the disaster of 1914?
In our history this education injustice depended greatly on the care-
ful division of function between church and state. The state was con-
cerned 'ideally' with the immediate instituting of justice in the world;
the church was 'ideally' concerned with holding high perfection in its
cosmic significance, and with the education which proceeded there-
from. Obviously at nearly every moment each of these institutions
abused their proper functions and trespassed on each others preroga-
tives. Indeed, whatever the difficulties in understanding the origins of
technological society in the Christian West, one of the moments where
its origin is evident lies in the activity of the pope whose popular name
was Hildebrand. In this controversy with the empire, Hildebrand not
only insisted on the spiritual rights of the church, but also on the con-
trol of the world, by the papacy's power over the naming of the
emperor. By this vast extension of the church's power over the world,
he turned the church from its traditional role of holding forth the mys-
tery of perfection, to the role of control in worldly affairs. The appara-
tus of education in the church was turned to the world, including the
activity of thinkers. We should not be surprised that Swift's Battle of the
Books places Thomas Aquinas among the moderns, not the ancients.
The accounts of justice which have become dominant during the age
of progress have not been based on its definition as rendering each
being its due. This has happened largely because it has not been widely
thought in our age that we can have knowledge of what is due to each
being. An analogy has often been used to describe the central differ-
ence between pre-progressive and progressive theories of justice. In all
theories of political justice it must be assumed that some limitation is
478 The Beautiful and the Good

placed on individual liberty. In the traditional theories this limitation

was vertical, received by human beings in what they knew about the
whole, which quite transcended any individuality. What was given in
our knowledge of the whole was a knowledge of good which we did not
measure and define, but by which we were measured and defined. The
modern theories depended on a horizontal limitation, which arose
from the fact that one human being's right to do what he wanted had to
come to terms with the right of others to do what they wanted. The
basis of society was the calculation of the social contract wherein sensi-
ble human beings calculated that all had to surrender some part of
their unlimited desire for freedom in order to enjoy the benefits of set-
tled society. This contractarian view of the state was as much part of
communism through the dependence of Marx upon Rousseau, as it
was part of American democratic capitalism through the founders'
dependence on Locke's rights to 'life, liberty, and property.' In Perpet-
ual Peace Kant put the matter lucidly. He wrote that it would be possible
to have a just society composed of a nation of clever devils. If they were
smart enough to negotiate the social contract, they could have a just
society.
As it is my intention to state that something has been lost for us with
the waning of the old account of justice, it is well to think about what
has been gained in and through the modern accounts. Some examples:
whatever the differences in theory or application between democratic
capitalism and communism, clear statements about equality were
present in both theories. And before one ever speaks against equality, it
is well to remember what it was like for those at the bottom of the lad-
der when the principle of equality was modified by the principle of
hierarchy. It is bad enough for those at the bottom of the ladder under
our systems, but at our best this cannot be justified by theory. Or again:
Locke was the chief philosophical progenitor of the American pursuit
of 'life, liberty, and property' and he said what he said about govern-
ment because he thought the end of life was comfortable self-preserva-
tion. It is well to remember how much comfortable self-preservation is
a key end in life. The modern union of contractarianism and techno-
logical science has, despite all the terrors of modernity, added to many
people's 'comfortable self-preservation.' Or again: the question can be
formulated by saying that the pre-progressive thinkers said virtue was
the core of a just political order, while the moderns have given freedom
that position. It is well to remember how much all of us want to do what
we want to do, and do riot want to be interfered with by others, partic-
 Love 479

ularly when that interference is in the name of some virtue which seems
completely alien to us.
Nevertheless, it seems necessary to state what has been lost theoreti-
cally in the modern definitions of justice. What has been lost is the
belief that justice is something in which we participate as we come to
understand the nature of things through love and knowledge. Modern
theories of justice present it as something human beings make and
impose for human convenience. This is done in a physical environment
which is understood in terms of necessity and chance. Obviously the
traditional belief, as much as the modern, included cognizance that
human beings were responsible for doing things about justice. Human
beings built cities, empires, etc., and some regimes were better than
others. To use the favorite expression of the Enlightenment, human
beings have in modernity taken their fate into their own hands. Their
theories of justice teach them that our institutions are what we make in
terms of our own convenience.
The central cause of this great change has been modern natural sci-
ence. Brilliant scientists have laid before us an account of how things
are, and in that account nothing can be said about justice. It is indeed
not surprising, therefore, that in the coming to be of technological sci-
ence the dependence of our objective science upon calculus has been
matched by the dependence for knowledge of justice upon calculation.
When the world is understood as necessity and chance, then justice has
to be made by the 'authentic' freedom of human beings, so that con-
flicts between our pleasure seekings can be worked out. It is not surpris-
ing that those studies in our multiversities which depended on our
intelligence being enlightened by love, and which were publicly sus-
tained because they taught people to participate injustice, should now
have faded into antiquarian research. After all it is not very difficult to
know these days what justice is, what beauty is. The first is the result of
interested calculation; the second is the means of entertainment.

The woman who wrote the definition of faith from which I have pro-
ceeded once also wrote: 'One can never wrestle enough with God if one
does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth
to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside for
him to go towards truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.'
That is a great hope given us by a woman who had pure regard and who
480 The Beautiful and the Good

had gone far. But did she, in the sheer force of her intellect, know how
much the rest of us can be diverted by the modern paradigm from that
fearful wrestling - and indeed from the pure regard? How is it possible
to think that the modern paradigm is sufficient to the needs of human
beings? And yet how is it- possible, in the midst of that paradigm and its
stranger and wilder consequences, to reach into the truth that the
world proceeds from goodness itself?

Of course, for both Christianity and Platonism, goodness itself is an

ambiguous mystery. In Christianity, God's essence is unknowable. In
The Republic it is said that goodness itself is beyond being. Both Chris-
tianity and Platonism have therefore often been ridiculed as final irra-
tionality. If the purpose of thought is to have knowledge of the whole,
how can we end in an affirmation which is a negation of knowing? It is,
above all, these agnostic affirmations which bring Platonism and Chris-
tianity so close together. Without this agnosticism humans tend to
move to the great lie that evil is good and good evil. In Christian lan-
guage this great lie is to say that providence is scrutable.

Why not turn to the language of modern philosophers to present

Christ in relation to all that is? The chief argument for so doing would
be that the great event between ancient and modern philosophy was
Christianity, and therefore most modern philosophy is impregnated
with Christian language (even if only in the form of secularized mem-
ory) . Would it not therefore be wise to use such modern language to
explicate the relation of Christ to all that is?
My answer to this argument would be in one word - Heidegger. His
writings make up the profoundest and most complete modern philoso-
phy - certainly the deepest criticism of ancient thought which has ever
been made in the name of modernity. Yet it is a philosophy which
excludes something essential to Christianity. Heidegger writes that
Nietzsche's dictum 'God is dead' means that the God of morality is
dead. Now indeed Christianity is not morality; nor is it 'morality tinged
with emotion.' Nevertheless, we have been told, 'Blessed are those who
hunger and thirst after righteousness.' 'Morality' is indeed a boring
word; but finally it is the same as 'righteousness.' If God who calls for
 Love 481

righteousness is dead, then Christianity's God is dead. Do we think that

we know better than Heidegger what he means, and thus use him to
write about Christianity? But if not Heidegger, who? He speaks more
comprehensively and more deeply than any modern philosopher.
It is not wise to criticize Christianity in public these days when so
many journalists and intellectuals prove their status by such criticism.
Nevertheless, it seems true that Western Christianity simplified the
divine love by identifying it too closely with immanent power in the
world. Both Protestants and Catholics became triumphalist by failing to
recognize the distance between the order of good and the order of
necessity. So they became exclusivist and imperialist, arrogant and
dynamic. They now face the results of that failure.
Modern scientists, by placing before us their seamless web of neces-
sity and chance, which excludes the lovable, may help to re-teach us the
truth about the distance which separates the orders of good and neces-
sity. One of Nietzsche's superb accounts of modern history was that
Christianity had produced its own gravediggers. Christianity had pre-
pared the soil of rationalism from which modern science came, and its
discoveries showed that the Christian God was dead. That formula gets
close to the truth of Western history, but it is nevertheless not true. The
web of necessity which the modern paradigm of knowledge lays before
us does not tell us that God is dead, but reminds us of what Western
Christianity seemed to forget in its moment of pride: how powerful is
the necessity which love must cross. Christianity did not produce its
own gravediggers, but the means to its own purification.

NOTES

1 S. Weil, La Pesanteur et La Grace (Paris: Plon 1948). My translation. The

greater the writer the more hesitant is the translator.
2 The tendency of human beings to become self-engrossed has been encour-
aged in our era, because the distinctiveness of modern political thought has
been the discovery of 'individuality.' It is not my purpose here to discuss the
good or evil of that 'discovery' but simply to state that one of its conse-
quences has been to legitimize concentration on the self.
3 Mozarts Bnefe, ed. L. Nohl, 2nd edition, 443-4. It is significant that in quoting
this passage Heidegger stops before Mozart's words about the best gift of
God. (See Der Satz vom Grund, Pfullingen 1957, chapter 9). Indeed, in his
comments on this quotation Heidegger writes of Mozart as 'the lute of
482 The Beautiful and the Good

God' - a metaphor he takes from a poem of Angelus Silesius. But is Mozart's

account of his activity properly grasped in calling him 'the lute of God?' To
put the matter directly, was there not some moment when Mozart could
have exercised the liberty of indifference to what had been given him? On
the one hand Kant's insistence on our own autonomy kills a proper partak-
ing in beauty and in its extremity leads to the modern doctrine of art as
human creativity (whatever that may mean) and so art is understood quite
apart from the divine gift. But on the other hand the metaphor of 'the lute
of God' about Mozart sweeps away the liberty of indifference which is what
we properly mean by freedom, in this case the freedom of the artist. At the
height of sanctity Angelus Silesius's metaphor might be appropriate. But
Heidegger uses it here about an artist, albeit a supreme one. There has been
some questioning of the authenticity of this passage from Mozart's letters,
but in 1957 Heidegger says it is authentic.
 Index

abortion 108, 115, 142, 146, 148, 149, 16, 17, 187, 211, 212, 312, 331, 398;
296, 415 City of God 15, 329; De Trinitate 15;
Action Catholique 123 and Plato 211,217
Aitchison, Jim 311 Augustus, Emperor 215, 217
Alexander of Macedon 270 Ayer, AJ. 305
Allport, Gordon 217
Amnesty International 456n, 457, Bach.Johan Sebastian 173, 468, 470
459 Bacon, Francis 22, 26, 38, 223, 224,
Anansi Press 366 321-2
Anderson, Francis 321, 321, 322 Barre, Laurent 122
Anderson, Fulton 22-3, 157, 190 'The Battle between Teaching and
Antigone 249 Research' 13
antiquarianism 285, 303 Battle of the Books 365, 477
anti-Semitism 380-1, 382 Bayleyjohn 370
Aquinas, Saint Thomas 211, 312, 477 Beautiful, the 28
Aristophanes 290 Beautiful Losers 368
Aristotle 8, 18, 38, 71, 81, 169, 179, beauty 253, 438-9, 464-72
188, 212, 221, 222, 236n, 266, 296, being 298, 363, 364, 442, 460
302, 362, 373, 440; as seen in the Being and Time 15, 297, 300, 302, 304
age of progress 82; and suffering Bennett, R.B. 123, 139
220 Bentham, Jeremy 130, 312, 398
Arnold, Matthew 376 Beowulf 195
art 358, 374, 410-11, 468; and enter- Bertrand, Jean-Jacques 127
tainment 468 Beyond Good and Evil292, 418
Assisi, Saint Francis of 241 Bhagavadgita 243, 251, 261
Atwood, Margaret 151 Bible, the 357-61, 462
Augustine of Hippo, Saint 4, 14, 15, Blackmun, Harry A. 109, 415
484 Index

Blake, William 167, 357 Castle to Castle 370

Bleak House 356 Castro, Fidel 142
'Bliss' 30 Cathars 250, 259; and the Albigen-
Bloom, Allan 19 sian crusade 250, 259
Borden, Sir Robert 48, 139 Catholicism, Roman 434
Bourassa, Henri 123, 124 'Celine - Art and Polities' 24
Bourassa, Robert 106 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand 8, 23, 313,
Brett, George S. 165 368, 369-83; Castle to Castle 370;
British Commonwealth 43-50 Death on the Installment Plan 370,
British North America Act 43 375; North 370; Rigadoon 370, 373,
Broadbent, Ed 151, 152 375; Journey to the End of Night 370
Brotz, Howard 19 Chamberlain, Neville 377
Bryan, William Jennings 135 Chartier, Emile Auguste 239n
Buddhism 349, 353 Chomsky, Noam 364
Bultmann, Rudolf 440 Choquette,J.-A. 122
Burroughs, William 370 Christ. See Jesus Christ
business 64 Christian, William 355
Christianity 7, 14, 31, 182, 270, 340,
Calvin 38 344, 360, 388, 398, 401, 402, 443,
Calvinism 404 460, 476, 480, 481; and Buddhism
Cambridge University 203 354; Calvinist 401, 403; and cre-
Camus, Albert 246, 255, 261 ation 264; and the crucifixion 302;
Canada 54, 57, 160, 458; and the George Grant and 6, 7; history of
American empire 451; and beauty, 216; and justice 475; and moder-
472; and the Commonwealth 46; nity 280; and the new liberty 225;
the disappearance of 77, 78-81; and philosophy 306; and Pla-
and freedom 48; involvement in tonism 16, 267; as the religion of
the Vietnam War 91, 92; and the suffering 220; and Saint Augustine
mass society 51; as a satellite of the of Hippo 218; and science 467; sec-
U.S.A. 85, 90; teaching of philoso- ularized 144, 250, 256, 316, 397
phy in 165 Christianity and Classical Culture 15,
Canada's Tomorrow53, 54 166, 202, 215
Canadian Association for Adult Edu- Churchill, Winston 377
cation 4, 43, 173 City of God 15, 329
Canadian Conference on Social Wel- civil disobedience 90
fare 24 Civil Elegies 361, 367
Capital 236 civilization, Western Christian 47
capitalism 301, 478; state, 65; leaders Civilization and Its Discontents 337, 350
of, 65 civil rights movement 87-8
Carre, John Le 356 Cochrane, C.N. 15, 166, 202, 213,
 Index 485

214—18; Christianity and Classical 'Dennis Lee - Poetry and Philoso-

Culture 15, 166, 202, 215 phy' 24
Cohen, Leonard 368; Beautiful Losers Derrida, Jacques 304
368 Descartes, Rene 224, 293
Cohen-Portheim, Paul 47 De Trinitate 15
Coles, Robert 256, 258, 259, 260, 262, Dewey, John 55, 177, 180, 182, 184,
263 333
communism 301, 314, 403, 478 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House 356
computers 420-4, 427-8 Diefenbaker, John 9, 58, 76, 77, 104,
La Condition Ouvriere 247 133, 139; the nationalism of 136
conduct 323, 324 Dilthey, Wilhelm 194
conservatism 9, 79; in Great Britain, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
80 among Men 7, 22
Conservative Party 66, 133 Disraeli, Benjamin 138-41
Constantine, Emperor 217 Dostoevski, Fyodor 371
contemplative life, the 157-8, 159 Doull, James 5, 16, 19, 20, 266, 303,
continentalism 81 303n, 304, 306
contractualism 108, 113, 313, 314;
and the state, 478 education: democratic 177, 178;
Couchiching conference 50, 95 George Grant's view of 10-13;
Critique of Judgment 207, 221 mass 179; and philosophy 10;
Critique of Practical Reason 17, 329 philosophy of 184, 185, 186; pur-
Critique of Pure Reason 16, 222, 224, pose of 177, 180, 184; and religion
254 178
Crook, Rod 45In Einstein, Albert 34, 72
Cross, Saint John of the 464, 475 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 95
Electro 249
Dalhousie University 5, 7, 13, 22, 50, Eliot, T.S. 211
321; medical school at 182 Ellul, Jacques 25, 394—8; Propaganda
Dannhauser, Werner 290, 290n, 291, 394, 395; The Technological Society 6,
292, 293 25, 394
Darwin, Charles 17, 70, 81, 228, 313, 'The Empire: Yes or No?' 43
314, 460 The End of History and the Last Man 19
The Death of Harold Ladoo 361, 267 Engels, Friedrich 228
Death on the Installment Plan 370, 375 English-SpeakingJustice 1, 9, 10, 108,
'In Defence of North America' 25 108n,224, 226
Degas, Edouard 371 Epicureanism 466
de Gaulle, Charles 105, 137, 240, 378 equality 70, 72; in Canada 71; in
democracy: and education 182; mass North America 68; of participation
184; social and political 175 in mind 75; religious foundations
486 Index

of 69; in society 68-75; in the tech- Frye, Northrop 23, 167, 357-61, 412;
nological society 74 and polytheism 360
excellence, human 198, 200 Fukuyama, Frances; The End of His-
existentialism 298, 300, 360, 367, tory and the Last Man 19
414; philosophers of 333 Fulbright, J.W. 90, 92, 93
existentialists 286
Expo '67 105, 105n Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
(Mahatma) 89
Fackenheim, Emile 18 George Gershwin; Rhapsody in Blue
fact-value distinction 12, 120, 192, 469
193, 194, 219, 281, 392; and social Gladstone, William 138, 139, 140,
science 392 477
faith 251, 461, 463, 467 Globe and Mail 200
'Faith and the Multiversity' 16, 30, Glover, Edward 337
237 gnosticism 338, 344
Farrer, Austin 441 gnostics 342, 343
fascism 142, 147, 149; and North God 4,11, 35, 53, 59, 69, 80,148, 179,
America 149 180,187, 211, 227, 229, 237, 258,
fate, the love of 281-3, 284, 285, 286 391, 396, 428, 439, 474, 480; the
The Feminine Mystique 392 existence of 212; the love of 176
Flexner, Simon 203, 203n Goldwater, Barry 95
Forsey, Eugene 3 Good 7, 28, 207, 209, 221, 387, 456,
Franklin, Benjamin 401, 402 465-7
A Free Man's Worship 332, 333 'Good Friday' 28
freedom 8, 52-3, 82, 86, 89, 389-90, goodness 429
391, 393, 396, 405, 429, 430, 449, Gorgias 474
450; human 423; in a technologi- Gospels, the 14, 80, 243, 252, 358,
cal society 389; in the technologi- 360, 475
cal world 58 Graham, Billy 97, 183, 402
Free-Trade Agreement 150, 151 Grant, George Munro 3, 43
Frege, F.L.G. 381 Grant, George Parkin 294; as a Chris-
Freud, Anna 257, 259 tian Platonist; and Christianity 27-
Freud, Sigmund 23, 118, 219, 286, 8, 31; correspondence with Leo
333, 474, 334-44; 345, 346, 347, Strauss 19; and the crucifixion 28,
348, 349, 351, 354; Civilization and 447; defence of Plato against
Its Discontents 337, 350 Heidegger 20, 31, 297, 306; and
Friedan, Betty 392; The Feminine Mys- justice 27; and liberalism 211; and
tique 392 modernity 24; as a political philos-
friendship 361-2 opher 295; and religion 27; and
Front de liberation du Quebec 102 technology 25-7; The Battle
 Index 487

between Teaching and Research' Alexandre Kojeve 268; George

13; 'Bliss' 30; 'Celine -Art and Pol- Grant's rejection of 6; and history
ities' 24; 'In Defence of North 341; Logic 236n; and metaphysics
America' 25; 'Dennis Lee - Poetry 269; Phenomenology of Mind 236n,
and Philosophy' 24; 'The Empire: 398; Phenomenology of Spirit 270; Phi-
Yes or No?' 43; English-Speaking Jus- losophy of History 236n
tice!, 9, 10, 108, 108n, 224, 226; Hegelian logic 272
'Faith and the Multiversity' 16, 30, Heidegger, Martin 8, 14, 15, 18, 20,
237; 'Good Friday' 28; 'Jelte 25, 251, 280, 297-311, 315, 362-3,
Kuipers -An Appreciation' 29; 364, 368, 369, 370, 377, 378, 379,
'Justice and Technology' 16, 26; 407, 419, 424, 441, 442, 443, 463,
'Knowing and Making' 25, 26; 481, 481 n, 482n; the criticism of
Lament for a Nation 6, 9, 10, 24, 29, Plato by 299; George Grant's
43, 76, 399; 'Memorial Address' defence of Plato against 8; as an
20; 'Nietzsche and the Ancients' historicist 442; as a member of the
21; 'Notes on the Good' 31; The Nazi Party 297; and Nietzsche 292;
Paradox of Democratic Education' as a philosopher of the modern 20,
11; 'Philosophy' 23; Philosophy in 300, 480; and Plato 304; and poly-
the Mass Age 5, 6, 21, 23, 29, 226; 'A theism 301, 303, 360; Being and
Platitude' 16, 29; 'The Question Time 15, 297, 300, 302, 304; An
Concerning Technology' 20; Tech- Introduction to Metaphysics 121n,
nology and Empire 6, 24, 448; Tech- 442; Nietzsche 20, 292; Plato's Doc-
nology and Justice'7, 8, 25, 418; trine of Truth 306, 442; The Principle
'Technology and Justice' 24, 461; of Reason 299, 442; What Is Called
Time as History 6, 21, 27, 279; 'Tyr- Thinking? 306
anny and Wisdom' 19; 'The Univer- Heisenberg, Werner 408
sity Curriculum' 12; 'Value and Hemingway, Ernest 372
Technology' 24; 'What Is Philoso- Herbert, George 261
phy?' 11; 'What Is Political Philoso- hierarchy of talent 72, 73
phy?' 18 Hildebrand 477
Grant, Maude 50 Himmler, Heinrich 328
Grant, Sheila (nee Allen) 4 Hinduism 353, 459
Grant, William 3, 50 Hippocratic oath 415
Gravity and Grace 244, 245 historicism 194, 268, 289, 292, 293,
The Greek East and the Latin West 15, 297, 300, 309, 316, 433, 471; as an
214 expression of existentialism 300
Grunewald, Matthias 238 history 231, 313-17, 340, 419, 426,
427, 428; the idea of 230; study of
Hegel 5, 11, 17, 19, 80, 81, 196, 212, 194
221, 250, 270-5, 279n, 354; and History of Western Philosophy 312, 333
488 Index

Hitler, Adolf 381; and will 144 Jones, Ernest 337

Hitlerism. See National Socialism Journey to the End of Night 370
Hobbes, Thomas 81, 223, 401 Joyce, James 373, 373n
Holmes, Oliver Wendell 109 Judaism 253, 270, 360
Homer 372; Iliad 243, 249, 367n Jung, Carl Gustav 23, 344-54; and
Hooker, Richard 78 the collective unconscious 348;
Howe, C.D. 418 Modern Man in Search of a Soul 350
human excellence 98, 99 justice 7, 26, 111-12, 114, 117, 120,
humanism 340, 343 435-43, 448, 456, 457, 476-9, 474;
humanities, the role of the 195, 196, and beauty 476; as equality 115;
197 and Immanuel Kant 225; and John
Hume, David 114, 223, 460 Stuart Mill 130; and liberty 116;
Humphrey, Hubert H. 94, 94n modern liberal 111, 117-18;
Nietzsche's conception of 295; and
idea 440, 442 philosophy 112; public 118; and
ideals 419-20, 425, 427, 430, 431 religion 112
Iliad 243, 249, 367 'Justice and Technology' 16, 26
imperialism; capitalist 153; Chinese
227; Russian 227 Kant, Immanuel 14, 15, 16, 17, 38,
industrial growth, beyond 418-34 112, 115, 192, 202, 207, 212, 218-
Innis, Harold 23, 167, 215, 354-7; 26, 236n, 294, 296, 328, 333, 368,
and universities 356 440, 471, 478, 482n; and the auton-
Intimations of Christianity 249 omy of the will 222, 223, 224; and
Introduction to Metaphysics 121n, 442 duty 219; and human freedom
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 266 423; and secularized Christianity
Islam 270, 360 114; Critique of Judgment 207, 221;
Critique of Practical Reason 17, 329;
James, Henry 373 Critique of Pure Reason 16, 222, 224,
James, William 217 254; Perpetual Peace 222, 478
'Jelte Kuipers — An Appreciation' 29 Kaufmann, Walter 291
Jesus Christ 37, 213, 219, 237, 256, Kennedy, John F. 105, 136, 200
257, 337, 373, 435, 437, 466, 476, Kennedy, Robert F. 93, 93n
480; possession by 243-4; and Sid- King Lear 367, 468-9
dharta Gotauma 354 King, Mackenzie 66, 66n, 129
John the Baptist 28 'Knowing and Making' 25, 26
John the Evangelist, the Gospel knowledge, ways of 243
according to 251 Kojeve, Alexandre 14,19, 24, 266-78,
Johnson, Daniel 105, 127 278n, 394; Introduction to the Read-
Johnson, Lyndon B. 91, 93, 95, 96, 97 ing of Hegel 266
Johnson, Pierre-Marc 127n Krell, David 20, 297, 299, 305, 306
 Index 489

Kuipers,Jelte 453-6 Long, Huey 117, 142

Long, Marcus 188, 188n, 189, 190
Lament for a Nation 6, 9, 10, 24, 29, 43, Lougheed, Peter 126
76, 399 love 33, 211, 461, 463-5, 467-8, 470,
Lasswell, H.D. 192 472-6; sexual 472-4; ways of 243
Laurendeau,J.-E.-A. 123 loving and thinking 288, 290
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid 48 Lucretius 398
Laurin, Camilla 126 Luther, Martin 163
Lawrence, D.H. 240-1, 373 Lynd, Staughton 85, 85n
The Laws 209
Laxer, Jim 10 Macdonald, Sir John A. 48, 138, 139
Layton, Irving 366 Machiavelli 8, 18, 81
Lee, Dennis 23, 361-9; Civil Elegies Mackintosh, W.A. 128
361, 367; The Death of Harold Ladoo Macpherson, C.B. 431
361, 367; The Gods 364; Savage Mailer, Norman 343
Fields 367, 368 Makarios, Archbishop 457
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 298, 299 making 410, 414, 415
Lenin, Vladimir 228 Mansfield, Katherine 459
Letter to a Priest 249 Marcuse, Herbert 226, 341, 394
Levesque, Rene 107, 122, 127, 128 Marx, Karl 14, 17, 21, 81, 88, 102,
Levi-Strauss, Claude 100 112, 226-36, 246, 247, 281, 285,
Liberal Party 66, 134 286, 315, 333, 340, 354, 379, 380,
liberalism 98, 116, 128, 129, 142, 191, 394, 398, 460, 478; and Christianity
250, 406; American 426, 429; and 230; contempt for in the West 227;
excellence 198; and historicism his debt to Hegel 230; and human-
316; modern contractual 10, 109- ism 228, 234; as a philosopher of
10. 119, 451; nineteenth-century history 228, 230; and religion 229;
128; Protestant 403; secularized Capital 236n
Christian 420; and the technologi- marxism 250, 311, 313, 426, 429; and
cal society 198; and technology equality 70; and opposition to
118,313,425 Pierre Trudeau in Quebec 106;
liberals, English-speaking 438 and science 235; and technology
liberty, the new 224 425
Linneatis, Carrolus 412 marxists 438
literature: scientific study of 358, 412 Massey lectures 6, 21, 279
Living in an Atomic Age 324, 332 Massey Royal Commission on the
Locke, John 112, 223, 313, 314, 379, Arts and Letters 11, 13, 22, 157,
401, 402, 460, 478; The Reasonable- 322
ness of Christianity 313 mass society 51, 52, 59, 60-1, 66, 67,
Logic 236n 75, 179; and education 55; and
490 Index

freedom 61; the goals of socialism myths 388-9, 393

within 62; and the individual 61
Masters, WJ. 240-1 Namier, Sir Lewis 195n
mastery of nature: the pursuit of 86 Napoleon 328
McLuhan, Marshall 99, 355 National Education Association 183
McMaster University 6, 200; depart- National Research Council 56
ment of religion at, 7, 13 National Socialism 121n, 144, 145,
Medawar, Peter 412, 416 255, 291, 300, 305, 312, 314, 369,
medical profession. See medicine: 371, 403, 429; and Darwinian biol-
practitioners of medicine 345,409; ogy, 148
practitioners of 338, 419 National Socialist party 144, 145, 147
'Memorial Address' 20 National Socialist regime 370
Las Meninas 367 nationalism 95; Canadian 9, 150,
metaphysical poetry 261-2, 242 165; in Canadian political parties
metaphysics 306, 310, 443 152; in Quebec 106
La Metaphysique Religieuse de Simone Nazi Party. See National Socialist
Weil263 Party
Mill, John Stuart 128; and pleasure, Nazism. See National Socialism
131; On Liberty 132 Neatby, Hilda 55
Miller, Henry 343 The Need for Roots 246
Milton,John 137 Neo-Vedanta and Modernity 30
Modern Man in Search of a Soul 350 New Democratic Party 58, 311
modernity: psychotherapy as a prod- New Left, the 83, 84, 85, 87
uct of 340; understood as technol- Newman, Peter C. 151
ogy 30 The New Science of Politics 259
morality 283-4, 414-15, 480; and Newton, Isaac 412
Freud 342; socialist 66 Nicholson, J.W.A. 34n
Morel, E.D. 326-7, 329 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 15, 18, 20, 21,
Morse, W.L. 93 31, 113, 114, 115, 121n, 192, 194,
Moses 80 226, 258, 264, 265, 279-97, 290,
Mount Allison University: Wood lec- 299, 303-11, 312, 315, 316, 353,
tures at 7, 107, 108n 354, 400, 418, 443, 466, 474, 480,
Mowat, Farley 152 481; and art 308; followers of 438;
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 23, 29, as the great critic of Plato 294; and
72,77,238,294,301,302,367,373, modernity 286, 293; and nihilism
408, 410, 465, 469-71 291; and will 143; Beyond Good and
Mukerji, Bithika 30, 460; Neo-Vedanta £w7292, 418; Thus Spoke Zaratustra
and Modernity 30 290
Mulroney, Brian 150 Nietzsche 20, 292
mystery, the sense of 36 'Nietzsche and the Ancients' 21
 Index 491

nihilism 298, 400-1, 428, 429 Phaedo 209

North 370 Phaedrus 28, 209, 308, 309, 438, 476
Notebooks 247, 249, 254 Phenomenology of Mind 236n, 398
'Notes on the Good' 31 Phenomenology of Spirit 270
Philebus 209
Oliver, Michael 58 philosophers, Canadian 161
Oman, John 4 'Philosophy' 23, 322
On Liberty 132 philosophy 33, 34, 272; Canadian
On the Origins of Inequality among Men 165-8; and the Christian tradition
311 212; and the historical context
Ontario Teachers' Federation 178 309; modern 188, 291; progress in
On Tyranny 267 272; in the Protestant universities
openness 100-1 163; the relationship of God to 13;
Oppenheimer, Robert 34, 415 in the Roman Catholic universities
Oppression and Liberty 246, 254 162; and science 37; teachers of
Oxford University 3, 4, 11, 14, 16, 33, 171; and technique 159; and unify-
203, 214 ing techniques 168
Philosophy of History 236n
pacifism 83; George Parkin Grant Philosophy in the Mass Ageb, 21, 23, 29,
and 4 226
Papineau, Louis-Joseph 124 physics 408, 413-14, 433
'The Paradox of Democratic Educa- Planck, Max 412
tion' 11 'A Platitude' 16, 29
Parkin, Sir George 3, 43 Plato 4, 5, 8, 14, 17, 18, 27, 28, 31, 80,
Parkin, Maude 3 81, 139, 169, 176, 177, 182, 188,
Parmfnides 209, 298 189, 202, 207-13, 219, 220, 221,
Parsons, Talcott 192 222, 236n, 243, 248, 257, 266, 279,
Parti Quebecois 122 289, 290, 296, 298, 302, 306, 307,
Pascal, Blaise 37; Pensees 244 308, 309, 310, 315, 331, 333, 363,
Paul, Saint 38, 213, 270 368, 374, 390, 410, 415, 433, 438,
Peale, Norman Vincent 57 439, 440, 443, 459, 471, 477; and
Pearson, Lester 9, 76, 129, 134, 152, art 308; and the Beautiful 15; and
363 beauty 464; and democracy 176;
Pensees 244 the existence of God and 16; and
Perpetual Peace 222, 478 justice 27; and the origin of philos-
Perrin, Father 244, 245; Waiting on ophy 35; and poetry 362; as seen in
God, 244, 245 the age of progress 82; and suffer-
Petain, Henri Phillipe 374, 378 ing 220; and the VedantaSQ; Gorgias
Petrement, Simone 18, 254-6, 257, 474; The Laws 209; Phaedo 208-9;
259, 261,262, 263, 265n Phaedrus 28, 209, 308, 309, 438,
492 Index

476; Philebus 209; Republic 16, 28, Raphael 373

120, 176, 209, 220, 256, 263, 296, rationalism 114,290
304, 308, 328, 329, 360, 442, 466, Rawls.John 108, 113
475, 480; Sophist209; Symposium^, reason 211, 327-8, 329-30, 331, 333;
208-9, 309 ancient and modern, 283
Plato's Doctrine of Truth 306, 442 Reich, Wilhelm 343
Platonism 292, 480 religion: and philosophy 35, 189
Plotinus 16, 212 The Republic 16, 28, 120, 176, 209,
pluralism 198; American 116 220, 256, 263, 296, 304, 308, 328,
poetry 362-3, 376, 447 329, 360, 442, 466, 475, 480
political philosophy 290, 291; classi- research 201, 414, 416, 462; and fac-
cal 275; modern 274 ulties of arts 203
polytheism 361 reverence 287-8
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Stud- Rhapsody in Blue 469
ies 162, 171, 172 Rhodes Scholarship 3
Popper, Karl, 312; The Poverty ofHis- Riefenstahl, Leni 144, 144n; The Tri-
toricism 316 umph of the Will 144
populism 135, 136 Rigadoon 370, 373, 375
positivism 338 Roe v. Wade 10, 108, 108n, 141
positivists 286 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 7, 15, 17, 22,
The Poverty of Historicism 316 81,112, 296, 311-17, 426, 460, 478;
The Principle of Reason 299, 442 and the concept of history 222;
progressivism, English 305 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
Propaganda 394, 395 among Men 7, 22, 311
Protestantism 56, 57, 213, 221, 401, Royal Society of Canada 407, 408
402, 434; and the formation of Rusk, Dean 94, 94n
North American society 57; and Russell, Bertrand 22, 23, 189, 322-
John Stuart Mill 130; secularized 34, 441; A Free Man's Worship 332,
357 333; History of Western Philosophy
Proust, Marcel 373 312, 333; Living in an Atomic Age
psychology: as a science 345 324, 332
Pythagoras 249 Ryle, G. 305
The Pythagorean Doctrine 255
Sade, Marquis de: and sexuality 196,
Queen's Quarterly 12, 24 197
Queen's University 3, 163, 165, 202 Salinger, J.D. 353
'The Question Concerning Technol- Sartre, J.-P. 300, 372, 372n, 474
ogy'20 Savage Fields 367, 368
Scholem, Gershom 260
Rahner, Karl 251 Schumann, Maurice 240
 Index 493

science 358, 411; Aristotelian 467; Stronach, Frank 151

modern technological 461, 462, Sur La Science 249
467, 472, 481 Suzuki, David 151
La Science et Nous 254 Suzuki, D.T. 353
scientism 361 Swift, Jonathan 14; Battle of the Books
Segal, Hugh 10 365, 477
Self, Peter 16 Symposium 28, 209, 309
sexual life 463
sexuality 337, 343, 364, 450, 463, technique 39, 56, 86, 87, 100, 177,
472-3; and love 362 301, 395-6, 412, 424, 435, 448, 449,
Shakespeare, William 195, 373, 465; 450, 452, 470; dominance of 89-
King Lear 367, 468-9 90; judgment of 404, 406; origins
Shaw, George Bernard 371 of 397
Sherrard, Philip 15, 214; The Greek technological education: in Quebec
East and the Latin West 15, 214 126
Siegfried, Andre 47 technological science 86, 432
Silesius, Angelus 482 technological society 192, 298, 363,
Skelton, O.D. 129 396, 403, 404, 407, 411, 420, 448;
Social Purpose for Canada 58 and Judaism 381; and the role of
socialism: the belief in equality of universities 191; and sexuality, 146;
67 and tyranny 141
Socrates 37, 197-200, 241, 258, 290- The Technological Society 6, 25, 394
3, 435, 438, 455, 466, 467, 474, 476; technology 26, 29, 30, 117, 143, 265,
and the Christian tradition 266; as 301, 303, 322, 378, 403, 411-12,
the creator of rationalism 290; and 417, 422, 426, 431, 435-43; and
scepticism 328 change 102; global effects of 101;
Sophist 209 our need for 405; and religion 98;
Spinoza, Baruch 81, 212, 342 and Western Christianity 434
Stairs, Denis 151 Technology and Empire 6, 24, 447
Stalin, Josef 68, 228, 259 'Technology and Justice' 24
Stavisky, Serge 381 Technology and Justice 7', 8, 25, 418,
Strauss, Leo 6, 14, 18-19, 20, 24, 83n, 461
189, 221, 237, 266-9, 273-8, 278n, Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 264
285, 292, 294, 391; as an Aristote- Thatcher, Margaret 142
lian 221; Christian Platonism and Thibon, Gustave 244, 245; Gravity
19; and Plato 18; and political phi- and Grace 244, 245
losophy 273; Thoughts on Machia- Thoughts on Machiavelli 18
velli 18; On Tyranny 267; What is Thus Spoke Zarathustra 290
Political Philosophy? 18, 267, 278, Time 227
285 Time as History 6, 21, 27, 279
494 Index

Tocqueville, Alexis de 131 schools 158; and the technological

Tolstoy, Leo 284, 344; and sexuality society 201
196, 197; War and Peace 284 'The University Curriculum' 12
torture 456-9 University of Toronto 18, 19, 22, 83,
Torture in Greece 29 129,133,165, 170, 190, 202, 214,
Touzel, Bessie 392 321, 355; St Michael's College at
Toynbee, Arnold 353 162; Victoria College at 364
tradition 287-8; and Bertrand Russel Upper Canada College 3
327 Utopia, the politics of 86, 88
Trent University 202
The Triumph of the Will 144 Vallat, Xavier 262
Troeltsch, Ernst 402 value 387-8, 414, 465
Trotsky, Leon 255, 260 'Value and Technology' 24
Trudeau, Pierre 58, 102-3, 104, 105, value-free scholarship 294
137; and universalism 104; and the value-free social science 89, 191
War Measures Act 105, 106 values 280-1, 405, 419-20, 425, 427,
tyranny 99, 101, 267-9, 420; and fas- 430, 431
cism 143; in the Great Society 100; Vedanta, the 460, 466
and philosophy 268; science and Velasquez: Las Meninas 367
the making of 409 Venise Sauvee 249
'Tyranny and Wisdom' 19 Veto, M. 264; La Metaphysique
Tyrant, the Final 277 Religieuse de Simone Weil 263
Vico 81, 359, 471
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Vietnam War 83, 84, 90, 95, 285, 363;
45-7 and Canada 84; as genocide 91;
United Nations 44-5 interpreted within liberalism 363;
United States of America 45-9, 59, interpreted within marxism 363;
399, 400; as an empire 85 and the principles of the Great
universal and homogeneous state Society 97; and Richard Nixon 103
78-9, 82, 141, 275-8, 426, 405, 449; Virgil 216
according to Alexandre Kojeve Voegelin, Eric 259; The New Science of
269; and the end of philosophy Politics 259
273; and Judaism 380; as seen by Voltaire 380
classical philosophers 82; as a tyr-
anny 274, 277 Waffle, the 152
universities 454; Canadian 203, 176; Waiting on God 18, 244, 245
modern 87; as secular institutions Walpole, Horace 195
161; and the teaching of philoso- War and Peace 284
phy 158, 168, 174; and the teach- Watson, John 164
ing of technique 176; as technical Weber, Max 12, 18, 23, 192, 219, 401
 Index 495

Weil, Andre 260 La Science 249; Venise Sauvee 249;

Weil, Simone 6, 14, 16, 17, 19, 28, 30, Waiting on God 18, 244, 245
222, 237-65, 266, 303, 360, 369, What Is Called Thinking? 306
463, 475; and the Cathars 247; and 'What Is Philosophy?' 11
Christ 242; and Christianity 244, 'What Is Political Philosophy?' 18
249, 258; and creation 264; cri- What Is Political Philosophy? 18, 267,
tique of marxism 246; Freudian 278, 285
attacks, on 254; and gnosticism Whitehead, Alfred N. 118, 173, 439,
258-9; and God 240, 241, 242, 252, 441
255, 264; and Judaism 258; and will 143, 144; triumph of the, 145,
justice 254; and Krishna 261; 146, 147, 149
marxist attacks on 254; and the Wilson, Bertha 144
passion of Christ 241; on philoso- wisdom 34
phy and religion 247; and Plato Wittgenstein, Ludwig 188, 305, 316,
247, 249; on politics and society 455
246; and sexuality 257; Intimations Woodhouse, A.S.P. 167
of Christianity 249; La Condition Wordsworth, William 376n
Ouvriere 247; Letter to a Priest 249;
The Need for Roots 246; Notebooks Xenophon 268, 290
247, 249, 254; Oppression and Lib-
erty 246, 254; The Pythagorean Doc- York University 6, 187, 188, 190
trine 255; La Science et Nous 254; Sur