Meeting the public's demands
How common sense and mediation address ideology
I.
Diverse opinions build a common world. Each citizen’s opinion—in Hannah Arendt’s frequent phrase, each citizen’s “it-appears-to-me”—is a tacit acknowledgement that the citizenry shares a common world.1 Opinions come from particular points of view that animate a common world.
A community’s common sense builds over time as we express our opinions to one another and seek dialog with one another. This common sense makes empirical evidence possible. Common sense does so, Arendt says, by confirming that our sense perceptions “disclose reality” and aren’t merely “sensations of our bodies.”2 On the other hand,
A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are . . . almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.3
By “world,” Arendt doesn’t mean the Earth but the common human world consisting of “everything between us.”4 Common sense—a fruit of political participation—confirms this common world.
Common sense has been America’s best defense against ideology, says philosopher Eric Voegelin, who calls ideology “a language of obsession designed to prevent the contact with reality.” Ideology excuses people from political participation and, as a consequence, from reality itself.5 As more of us accept this excuse, ideology is destroying our common world.
Ideologies work by weaponizing ideas. Historian Joyce Appleby finds in the term “ideology” a “kind of code word for ideas converted into social forces.”6 Ideologies, she says, “are capable of organizing the consciousness of the individual by fusing interests with beliefs and ideals.”7 Self-organizing replaces community organizing.
We don’t experience ideologies when we’re speaking or acting in public spaces. Ideologies allow us, in the comfort of our homes, to feel anger, pleasure, discouragement, and elation over political news without having to speak or to act with others.
Ideologies suggest, then, that we have no responsibility for our common world.
For Voegelin, ideologies in all of their forms, left and right, rebel against a form of consciousness. Voegelin doesn’t support what Appleby condemns—her concept of individual consciousness. For Voegelin, consciousness and politics are related:
. . . consciousness has a structural dimension by which it belongs, not to man in his bodily existence, but to the reality in which man, the other partners to the community of being, and the participatory relations among them occur.8
Consciousness is neither solely individual nor solely collective in nature. Instead, consciousness comes with self-discovery through participation among individuals, the collective, and the transcendent. In fact, Voegelin says, “the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics.”9
Western politics has lost its transcendent aspect; as a result, ideologies rush in to create the transcendent on earth. Ideologies push to “immanentize the eschaton,” Voegelin says; that is, instead of faithfully moving in the power and weakness of new creation that Jesus’ and Paul’s communities modeled, ideologies propose to use force to bring about the final, heaven-like stage of history to the present world.10 They’ll end history by force if necessary.
For Voegelin, common sense isn’t as complete a political remedy as is repentance and turning toward the transcendent—“the ground of being”—but common sense amounts to unrealized spiritual progress toward that Being.11 One can imagine Voegelin, after listening to an American citizen dismissing the one-dimensional dictates of an ideology, saying to her, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”12
We want a just polity—whether we call it God’s kingdom on earth or the Beloved Community or something else—and we seek a political science that would teach us how to realize it. Voegelin believes, however, that a nation’s desire for an overarching principle of political science—for what columnist Walter Lippmann calls a public philosophy13—shows both a hunger and a need for “a differentiated noesis,” by which Voegelin means a turn to the ground of Being.14 When people ask for philosophy, Voegelin believes, what they really want are philosophers. But by “philosophers” Voegelin doesn’t mean intellectuals. Voegelin’s philosophers stand out more by their soul than by their intellect: philosophers are “men whose soul responds to eternal being.”
Voegelin’s “eternal being” is an encounter, not an object of study:
Eternal being is not an eternal object that could be discovered and studied ad libitum, but rather it is a compelling experience whenever it irrupts into time, thereby realizing itself in it. The place of this realization, as it occurs, is the soul of the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, who desires eternal being and, in love, opens his soul to its irruption.15
Most college faculties, of course, don’t include many of Voegelin’s kind of philosophers. But we need enough of them to leaven our politics with the age to come. Thomas Merton says much the same thing: “You cannot have social order without saints, mystics, and prophets.”16
II.
The most famous confrontation between medieval and modern mindsets occurs in 1608. King James I assembles all his judges to have them sign off on his plan: instead of the courts, he alone would decide certain kinds of judicial cases.17 The Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, whom James appointed to that office two years prior, objects.18
Edward Coke points out to King James that the king is not a judge. James responds that the law is based on reason, and that he (James) has as much reason as any judge.
Coke responds tactfully, distinguishing between two kinds of reason. He later summarizes his response:
. . . that true it was, that God has endowed his Majesty with excellent science, and great endowments of nature; but His Majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects, are not to be decided by natural reason but by artificial reason and judgment of law, which law is an [art] which requires long study and experience . . .
James responds by accusing Coke of treason, pointing out that if Coke’s position were true, then James himself “should be under the law.” Coke doesn’t disagree—at least about the king’s position with respect to the law—and he quotes the medieval jurist Bracton: “the king ought to be under no man, but under God and the law.”19 But unlike medieval kings, James aspires to become an absolute monarch.
Modern thought tends toward absolutism and immediate justice. Public opinion, expressed in polls and with no political institutions such as Jefferson’s “little republics” to mediate opinion and to benefit from it, tends to flatten out between two dominant and competing ideologies. Such unfiltered opinion comes across much like the peremptory queen in Alice in Wonderland, who frequently declares, apropos of nothing juridical, “Off with her head!”
Medieval thought, on the other hand, tends toward mediated, triadic justice. Instead of natural reason, it prefers “artificial reason,” by which Coke means informed and skillful reason. The Latin artifex means “skillful,” and both “artificial” and “artisan” are cognates of artifex.20 This skill Coke locates in lawyers’ familiarity with a conversation over time with “an infinited number of graue and learned men.”21
Law is “not logic alone,” as Professor James Stoner writes concerning Coke’s argument to James.22 The common law mediates between a litigant and justice, and its mediation stems from the legal profession’s community of interpretation that Coke believes extends back to time immemorial. That long conversation over time is found in reported case law.
But even with the availability of extensive reported case law, the common law itself remains unwritten. That’s because law, to Coke’s way of thinking, joins “reason and knowledge of particulars” and exists “not in books as a body of knowledge but in the minds of those who can use it.”23 Every new case activates the community, now rejoined in conversation.
When Bracton says that the king is under law, he is saying that the king is subject to that conversation like everyone else.24 This medieval concept of law—a community, trained in artificial reason, that mediates between a litigant and the greater community—is always threatened by the likes of King James.
III.
When Voegelin hears a public demand for a public philosophy, he understands the demand instead as a cry for philosophers. When Coke hears a public demand for justice, he understands it as a cry for lawyers. We want immediate answers, but immediate answers often lead to a cruel, immediate world. We need mediate answers instead, which means we need mediators and the communities of interpretation in which they flourish.
When we hear a public demand, what we might be hearing is demand for a public.
Discussion questions
1. At Bunker Hill, Col. William Prescott was reported to have ordered, “Don’t one of you fire until you see the white of their eye.” What if we held off on our ideological attacks on one another until we could “see the white of their eye,” meeting face to face in public space? What might happen to ideology?
2. Do you agree with Hannah Arendt that common sense confirms our common world? Do you agree with her about how common sense is formed? What do we mean when we say that someone has no common sense? Do we mean the same thing as Arendt does, or not?
3. Do you have a political ideology? Does this Substack have one? Are we doomed to follow ideologies, or can we participate in public life free of them?
4. Consider the package of positions on issues that make up a political party’s talking points. What do you know about the history of specific political parties—about how their packages of positions changed over time? Why did those changes happen?
5. Do you agree with Eric Voegelin that we need philosophers even more than philosophy? Do you agree with Edward Coke that we need lawyers even more than law? How might you restate their points?
6. What are the dangers or drawbacks of “natural reason”? What are the dangers or drawbacks of “artificial reason”? Do you stand with King James I or Edward Coke in their dispute?
The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (Schoken Books, 2005), 14-15.
Arendt, Human Condition, 208-209.
Arendt, 209.
Arendt, Promise of Politics, 201.
“Unlike the classical noesis [the classical intellectual faculty for arriving at truth], today’s noesis does not find itself in opposition to myth and sophism, but in quite another situation against the dogmatisms, especially the ideological ones.
“The symbols of ideological dogmatism . . . do not attempt to draw men into participation; rather, they constitute a language of obsession designed to prevent the contact with reality, a language developed by men who have closed themselves against the ground” of being. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 187-88.
Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 93.
Appleby, 94.
Eric Voegelin, In Search in Order, Order and History 5 (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), 15-16. Arendt agrees: “Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, A Harvest Book (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994), 470.
Quoted in McAllister, Revolt against Modernity, 258.
McAllister, 262. Like Voegelin, Arendt points out that ideologies claim to understand the sweep of history: “Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process—the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future—because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.” Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 470.
Voegelin, Anamensis, 198, 213.
Mark 12:34 KJV.
Lippmann, Public Philosophy.
Voegelin, 212-13.
Voegelin, 117.
Merton, Thomas Merton Reader, 375.
Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory, 30.
Stoner, 15.
Stoner, 30.
The original distinction between natural and artificial is also Aristotle’s distinction between First Nature and Second Nature. We still use the term “second nature” to refer to things we can do with skills we have mastered.
Quoted in Stoner, 23.
Stoner, 23.
Stoner, 38.
Stoner, 18.
Bryce, another insightful and well researched essay. You make a nuanced argument for public engagement and dialogue, and for mediation as a way to get us there. To your discussion of Arendt on common sense I might insert a bit of Gramsci on hegemony, and on definitions of ideology, insert a bit of Althusser on ideological state apparatuses.
This is a compelling defense of politics as participation in a common world, and the movement from Arendt and Voegelin to Coke is especially effective. My reservation is that mediation can preserve inherited blindness as readily as wisdom. Still, the central claim holds: immediate justice easily becomes cruelty, while a public must be patiently made through conversation. - Thanks, Bryce.