Transcendence as a Human and Political Problem: The Case of David Walsh

Abstract

David Walsh, editor of works of Eric Voegelin and Professor at The Catholic University of America has published, among other significant works, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (1990) and The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997). With the more recent publication of The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, he has further demonstrated a unique gift for reading modernity sympathetically, for discerning within it a certain luminosity, in fact a distinctly Christian luminosity, without losing sight of its darkest possibilities. Here is how Walsh explains the trajectory of this trilogy: After Ideology traces “the innermost truth of the modern world that emerges only in the moment of its calamitous contemplation of the abyss,” the meaning of “good and evil … discovered as the imprescriptible boundaries of our existence.” This meaning Walsh associates with an “insight into the priority of existence over all formulations of it,” an insight that became the thread for his continuing exploration of modern political order. The defeat of totalitarianism evidences a “spiritual strength” of liberal democratic societies that remains a mystery to us liberal democrats. The Growth of the Liberal Soul explores this mystery, rejecting the common conservative appeal to “accumulated … spiritual capital,” which neglects the question “how such capital functioned in the present.” The answer lies in a paradoxical effect of “liberal political practice,” in which, “by relying on a maximum of individual freedom, a way had been found to promote a freedom that was more than individual:”

The abbreviated language of rights, it turns out, contained within it the possibility of the growth of the soul by which responsibilities are eventually served. A surface incoherence conceals an inward coherence that is nowhere revealed except through existence itself.

In the most recent work, the magisterial concluding volume of the trilogy, Walsh seeks to elaborate this “coherence” revealed not in concepts but only “through existence itself” by means of searching and original interpretations of eight makers of the modern philosophical revolution, from Kant to Derrida. Each “conscientious rereading” (xiii) is to a remarkable degree at once very strong (compelling each author to address what Walsh sees as the fundamental stakes of the whole modern movement) and very generous or sympathetic (giving at least due credit to each for grasping and contributing essentially to this movement). Besides the more familiar “achievements of the modern spirit,” that is, “the growth of science and technology and of the global moral and political language of rights,” (xii), Walsh proposes to establish a third, “as momentous as the other two,” and in fact an antidote to the drift of the other two into dehumanizing instrumentalization or incoherence and chaos. This antidote is an “eschatological openness that is the indefinable mystery of the personal,” an insight “present at the very inception of philosophy and Christianity,” but made “fully transparent” only in this modern philosophical revolution.