The well-known political philosopher of the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973), said that liberal education led us toward culture and sought to form a man cultivated in mind and in accordance with his nature.

As we all seem to forget today, the term cultivation comes from the word agriculture, which means to take care of the land so that it produces; in this sense, education would be the cultivation of the mind according to its nature, therefore, it would be absurd for example to cultivate vegetables replacing water, fertilizers or light by other means, that is to say, pouring whiskey instead of water we cannot expect our crop to flourish, in the same way, it is not possible to think about the development of human nature if we do not give it what it requires for its development and wellbeing.

In this sense, teachers would be like farmers of minds dedicated to making them bear fruit.
However, as the great teachers (those great minds who were not the disciples of any previous teacher) are even scarcer to be found than the teachers themselves (who are not abundant compared to the farmers), this would be a severe problem. Still, one with an immediate solution, for although we do not have the teachers in flesh and blood, we do find them in their texts, that is to say, through the reading of the so-called “Great Books.”

Thus, “liberal education will then consist in the careful and proper study of the great texts which the great minds have left us, a study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginners.”

The term liberal education might initially generate some confusion for those who are not familiar with Strauss’s work or who are not situated in the world of political philosophy. We should not confuse the adjective liberal with the noun liberal.

When Strauss speaks of liberals, he refers to the adjective. A liberal is a person who practices liberality (generosity). For this, he must be a person with certain wealth but who uses it in a moderate way. That is to say, he enjoys it but also shares it with those who need it without losing it or squandering it because, in that case, he would cease to be liberal (practicing generosity).

Liberalism, as a noun, can simply be called an ideology that is identified with freedoms or rights, such as freedom of the press or freedom of expression, and appeared in the 19th century.

Clearly, liberal education is not the training of individual rights defenders but rather of citizens and human beings capable of fully developing their natural potential.

Following the classical literature, we could say that liberal education differentiates a free man from a slave (passions).  The full understanding of the meaning of liberal education can be found, for example, in the literature of Plato (The Laws and The Republic), Aristotle (Politics), and Xenophon (Education of Cyrus), as stated precisely in a passage found in Plato’s Laws: “liberal education is education from childhood in virtue, and which inspires the ardent desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to govern and how to be governed with justice.”

Certainly, two dimensions can be perceived in liberal education. The first one advocates a moral and religious education linked to the constitution of good citizens, as one would say, an education of the heart, while the other, more transcendent, corresponds to philosophy, to the education of the mind found, for example, in the seventh book of The Republic.

Following the classics, civic education was thus based on the formation of character to achieve virtue.

For example, Aristotle understood that the virtues (courage, affability, for example) were all those qualities necessary to be able to develop our human nature fully and that this was possible through the help of the city, hence the close relationship between ethics (which is nothing more than the formation of character) and politics. In contrast, the philosopher’s training was much more demanding in the sense that the search for knowledge has no limits and could, therefore, be fundamentally dangerous.

The essence of philosophy is permanent doubt, so in this respect, it can be seen as antagonistic to authority. The philosopher then had to write in an esoteric manner to mislead authority and thus conceal his true intentions.

There is no doubt that the liberal education of the philosopher, based on dialectics, is fundamentally more important than civic education. Still, we also know that without civic education, there is no point in talking about the cultivation of the mind (without a city, there is no philosophy).

Civic education, i.e. education that moderates the character and curbs the instincts, also inculcating patriotic or moral values, is significant for the progress of the city, in fact, civic education would be the prelude to the development of philosophy.

Strauss also thought that liberal education would serve to shape a good political regime in accordance with human nature, which also made sense of the following definition of liberal education: “Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to climb from mass democracy to democracy as it was originally“.

Democracy had to be understood as the government of free men as opposed to the mass democracy that would be constituted by those men not yet formed by civic education. Democracy, in fact, would be the regime that stands or falls by virtue:

“… democracy is a regime in which all or most of the adults are men of virtue, and as virtue seems to require knowledge, a regime in which all or most are virtuous or wise, or the society in which all or nearly all have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, becomes an aristocracy which has expanded into a universal aristocracy“.

However, as Strauss rightly pointed out, the predominance of political science in these times has served to make us see democracy exclusively in merely descriptive terms, appearing more as a procedure that serves, for example, to elect public servants in a competition open to all, in which public posts are contested, rather than as a form of government whose means and ends are virtue, that is, in a normative way, as political philosophy put it.

In this sense, it is understandable why, today, still under the influence of positivist discourse, the scientific thesis of democracy dominates, and thus, the concept of democracy as mass participation, as mass democracy, is assumed. This mass democracy, in turn, generates a mass culture that is achieved with the least intellectual or moral effort and lacks aspirations of transcendence. As Strauss pointed out, the people formed by mass culture are satisfied reading the sports page or the jokes page of the newspapers, but they can hardly be interested in public affairs, let alone be in a position to hold public office.

Evidently, the fact that our society is in crisis and its political institutions completely disqualified is an unmistakable symptom that mass culture and mass democracy have imposed themselves and that this situation is not gratuitous. In fact, this occurs when the spaces for forming and cultivating people, such as the family, the school, and the university, lose their meaning and purpose, thus abandoning their task of forming free and responsible men and women. Such an event only forces us to turn our eyes towards this form of education, which, amid our desolate panorama, appears as a resplendent oasis waiting to serve those who dare to reach out to it.

Sources: 

Hilail, Gildin (ed.). An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ten essays by Leo Strauss. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

Horwitz, Robert H. The Moral Foundations of the American Republic. Buenos Aires: Editorial Rei, 1986.

Pangle, Thomas L. The Ennobling of Democracy, the challenge of postmodern age. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

“What is Liberal Education?”, in: An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ten essays by Leo Strauss. Gildin, Hilail (editor). Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. p. 311.

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While the glitches and weaknesses of ChatGPT have been pointed out, these presumably will be corrected over time as the AI technology improves and its data set enlarges. There has also been discussion about cybersecurity and the economic and political implications that AI poses for societies. But most of the public discourse so far has been about higher education.

Unlike most academics who are skeptical, suspicious, or resigned about ChatGPT, I am hopeful, believing that AI could offer a genuine path for liberal education to revitalize itself in the university. Keep in mind I am not arguing from some techno-utopian perspective where transhumanism is the answer to everything—I also have reservations and concerns about the ubiquitous adoption of technology in our contemporary lives. But I do think technologies like ChatGPT could return American higher education to the fundamental questions of human identity, meaning, and flourishing that have been pushed aside the past fifty years for economic credentialing.

The Reactions So Far

For those not familiar with AI programs like ChatGPT, they are chatbots—computer programs to simulate conversations with humans—that predict what words and phrases should come next. As AI, they continually learn as they gather more data from human interaction and from texts like articles, books, and websites. The GPT-3 model, for example, was “trained” on a text set that included 8 million documents and over 10 billion words. While there are other AI chatbot programs, ChatGPT received the most attention when its third prototype launched this past November. That’s mainly because its technology convincingly mimicked human writing, though the business also had a superb marketing strategy that resulted in an estimated $29 billion valuation of OpenAI, ChatGPTS’s parent company.

The most common response from the academy has been resignation mixed with suspicion. Faculty know there is nothing they can do to stop AI from entering the academy. All that is left is to adjust and accommodate in the hope professors can retire before human teaching is entirely replaced. Recommendations include in-class writing examinations, assigning content behind a paywall, adopting show-and-tell exercises, and employing AI to teach students how to write better. While these suggestions are useful in identifying what constitutes human writing, they are only stop-gap measures before AI passes the Turing Test.

Strangely, one response to ChatGPT that is notably absent is an eagerness to discuss how AI can help students with disabilities in their writing. One would think that ChatGPT could help students with disabilities to learn how to write better or do their writing assignments. AI could possibly open the doors of higher education to a new set of students who may have difficulty completing writing assignments, for example, those with dyslexia or dysgraphia. In this sense, AI could expand access to higher education in ways that were previously not thought possible.

A second response has been skepticism. AI will not replace human writing because AI does not interact directly with the world and, therefore, cannot represent it as humans do. As John O. McGinnis puts it, “ChatGPT is just connected to the words people have written about the world, not the world itself. It floats on the vast sea of verbiage we have created and is not connected directly to the actual sea.” Practically, this is evident when, after entering a writing prompt in AI, professors evaluate them as acceptable in structure (for example, English’s composition five-paragraph essay) but point out factual mistakes or raise aesthetic questions about its writing, like its “voice” or its inability to engage the reader emotionally. According to this group, ChatGPT is a good facsimile of freshman undergraduate writing, but it is only a facsimile.

I suspect, however, that these obstacles will be overcome in time as the technology in AI improves. Its neural network will eventually process data more efficiently, and its learning capacity will improve as it gathers more data from additional texts and human interactions. It also raises the philosophical, Philip K. Dick type of question of what constitutes human writing if an AI can do it as well as people (a question better pursued another time). Regarding AI not being connected to the “actual sea” of reality, humans have been interfacing with AI for years, from purchasing airline tickets to visits to the doctor. Unfortunately for our skeptics, AI has been here for a while and is not going away.

A third response, a variation of the second, has been the belief that ChatGPT will never replace human skills like critical and creative thinking. AI may replace human writing, but not human thinking itself. But this may not be true, as evidenced by AI programs like AlphaGo, which has defeated the best Go players in the world, a feat that required both critical and creative thinking. If AI can think critically and creatively, there is no reason it couldn’t be designed to educate students in these skills in the near future.

In fact, ChatGPT’s ability to convincingly mimic human writing is actually a reflection of critical and creative thinking. Like numerical manipulation, writing is essentially about solving problems, whether they are about politics, policy, philosophy, aesthetics, or something else. What makes ChatGPT so unnerving to so many is that writing is perceived as a uniquely human endeavor, unlike numerical calculations. But both tasks—whether solving interpolation problems or writing philosophical essays—are fundamentally the same. They are solving problems—to think critically and creatively. AI programs can now do this both numerically and linguistically, albeit the latter imperfectly at the moment. With the advent of AI, the rationale that only humans can teach students critical and creative thinking has a limited shelf life.

Perhaps more controversially, it is not clear that universities actually teach critical thinking to their students. With every college course now required to articulate its student learning outcomes (SLOs)—outcomes that have to be quantified and measured—in order to demonstrate students are learning, one wonders, are these SLOs really telling us anything of value? Now that assessment drives academic content in American universities, the result is a flat account of critical thinking, where one number represents excellence and another number mediocrity. As one essay’s subheading about ChatGPT states, “In a world where students are taught to write like robots, it’s no surprise that a robot can write for them.”

Embrace the Future

The conversation about ChatGPT so far has mainly focused on the effects it will have on the humanities. Putting aside the ideological nature of the humanities and the problems that assessment poses to student learning, I think that humanities professors will be relatively better off compared to their faculty peers when AI is fully adopted by the university. The problem won’t be the mass unemployment of English, history, philosophy, classics, or theology professors (this already is a problem); rather, the problem will be the mass unemployment of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and pre-professional faculty. AI presents a greater threat to faculty teaching courses like Fixed Income Securities, Health Assessment, and Biochemistry than to faculty helping students understand and enjoy the texts of Homer, Aquinas, and Nietzsche.

In other words, the subjects taught by STEM and pre-professional faculty appear to be most likely to be replaced by AI in the future. These subjects require numerical critical thinking in making assessments about populations—something that AI does as well as, if not better, than humans now. For example, some AI programs have better diagnostic accuracy than human doctors, and last year an AI’s stock picks generated a higher price return than the S&P 500. Some are currently discussing whether AI will replace engineers, nurses, and accountants in the near future. The question that parents should ask their college-aged children now is not what they are going to do with that English degree, but rather, will there even be a job available when their civil engineer, nursing, or accounting major graduates?

Even more depressing for STEM and pre-professional faculty is the rise of alternative credentialing programs. Businesses like Google, Bank of America, GM, IBM, and Tesla have removed the college degree requirement for any positions in their companies. In some states, one can become a teacher at a private school without having an education degree. As AI improves its numerical and linguistic critical thinking skills, companies are likely to incorporate AI into their pre-screening and training of employees. There is also great potential for growth in alternative credential agencies, which can certify students in certain skills, and much will likely be available free online. All these trends challenge the university’s primary status as a credentialer and signaler to employers who can think and write.

This, in turn, raises the question of why parents should shell out tens of thousands of dollars every year for their children to attend college when they can learn free online, get accredited elsewhere cheaper and quicker, or be trained by their employer. For the elite universities—the Harvards, the Yales, the Stanfords—this is not likely to be an issue because the opportunity to network with children of the elite will outweigh any financial cost or lack of learning. But for those institutions in the mid-and low-tier, such as public regional comprehensive schools, AI poses an existential threat, especially if their funding model is based on STEM and pre-professional students. Granted, this process may take a few generations or a few years, but at some point in the future, the rationale for universities to teach STEM and pre-professional students will be weakened, if not outright disappear.

If the news about AI is bad for schools that rely on their STEM and pre-professional programs, it could be good for those universities that have a clearly defined mission and identity rooted in liberal education. If liberal education is to study something for its own sake in order for us to reflect upon who we are and what our purpose in life is, then this can be best accomplished by studying the humanities. By reading and discussing literature, history, philosophy, and other traditions of the humanities, students learn the inherent value of liberal education—to be free from the demands of necessity and call for utility in order to be connected to what authentically makes one a human being.

With AI, the point of university education might shift. It is no longer about the acquisition of economic or critical skills but about becoming a free and reflective human being. One enrolls in college because it is primarily understood as an intrinsic good for human flourishing. If you want a job, go learn AI on the Internet (although conceivably, AI could be incorporated as part of a liberal education). Strangely, we may, in the future, return to Plato’s Academy and Bologna University, where higher education was about contemplative learning, allowing students to reflect upon the fundamental and existential questions of identity, meaning, and purpose in their lives.

One potential concern is whether liberal education would be reserved only for the elite—really reflecting Plato’s Academy, where only the upper class could participate—while most of the populace is being trained by or replaced by AI. This is particularly problematic in a democratic society where inequality is currently a prominent topic in the public discourse. But it is also possible that a widely accessible liberal education may be available, as evident in the rise of the classical school movement, which places the humanities at the heart of its curriculum, or looking at past attempts like Robert Hutchins’ and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books program which believed liberal education was necessary for the survival of democracy.

Since the turn of the century, concerns about the place and relevance of liberal education in the American university have continued unabated. ChatGPT appears to put another nail in the coffin of liberal education; however, a closer look suggests it could be the key to liberal education’s resurrection. With employment demands, assessment requirements, and skill training gone, what is left for the university to do in the age of AI? To study things for their own sake—and only liberal education can provide that.

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Every time you make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe while standing nearly lifeless (or half dead) in front of that coffee pot on a particularly dismal Monday morning, it is not difficult to take it for granted that the coffee is there. It’s so obviously there, so how could it be otherwise? But in its thereness, the metaphysical question of being applies. Being is. But how come? However, maybe that coffee is not so very obvious after all. All effects obscure their causes, although, yes, sometimes causes obscure their effects. The truth is, we get used to things, and when we do, it gets easier to take them for granted without gratitude.

I don’t need to tell you, but I will anyway, that coffee is a popular drink. Every year, nearly two and a half billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, and at least half of those are by my brother-in-law. But this wasn’t always the case, especially before my brother-in-law turned five. If history had worked out a little differently, maybe we’d all be obsessed with something else entirely, like, say, mint tea. At one point in history, coffee was thought of as a “bitter invention of Satan.” It was shunned in the West because no one wants to end up demonically possessed by a beverage.

Legend has it that coffee was discovered around the year 850 A. D. by a poetically inclined Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new way. He began waxing Heideggerian about how man is not the lord of being, but the shepherd of being, and that was long before Heidegger showed up to confuse philosophy undergraduates.

Kaldi brought the cherries to an Islamic monastery where its devout dwellers experimented until the first form of coffee came into existence. As you would expect, when such a miracle is discovered, it spreads quickly. Not everyone was a fan, but, in general, coffee began to trend. When the West caught a whiff of the stuff, this ambivalent stance towards it continued. A mix of fascination and terror. The criticism seemed to outweigh praise until Pope Clement the 8th tried coffee and said these great words: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Well, thank Clement for that. But all of this brings me to the horrible realization I had today that my coffee had cooled down while I was reflecting on the history of coffee. I realized as that cold coffee touched my lips and as I shuddered at the brutality of that experience that we are often so busy getting caught in the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the details of the history of some or other beverage that we forget that just by contemplating coffee long enough, we might end up proving the existence of God and better understanding something of modern politics. It’s easier to do so, in fact, when you notice how your coffee changes. So, let’s contemplate change for a moment, shall we? We’ll get to the theology and politics of it in a moment.

Everything changes, you know. Things that are once were not, and will one day not be again. You and I are included in this, I’m afraid. And change can happen in different ways. Filling my cup: a quantitative change. Spilling my coffee: a location change. Coffee cooling down: qualitative change. Digesting the coffee: substantial change to the coffee and, although debatable, to me. Change would occur even if we lived in a simulation, and for that reason, it would need to be explained.

If I were drinking my coffee with Aristotle or St. Thomas, they would remind me that change involves the actualization of a potential. It involves making real what could be real. Coffee has the potential to get cold. I can heat it up again, too, but I’m too busy writing this thing to do that. All created beings are a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and these facets of being interact with each other. They interactualise. For a potential to be made real, something that possesses a certain actualizing power has to impart that actuality to what doesn’t have it, as when the room’s temperature cools the coffee down. Everything needs a real changer for change to happen.

Now, to make this very straightforward fact more interesting, let’s think of an isolated moment in the life of some coffee. The coffee is on my desk, next to me. It is approximately three feet off the ground because of the desk. The desk is approximately three meters from the ground because my house is on the first floor of a block of flats, and the block of flats is supported by a foundation, which is supported by the ground, under which is the turbulence and tormenting heat of lava, and so on. I’m thinking vertically here about the fact that the coffee is where it is in space and not just in time because it is dependent on other things, which are dependent on other things, which are dependent on yet other things. And so on. The coffee has no power on its own to be where it is. The coffee can only be where it is because it depends on the desk, and the desk can only be where it is because it depends on the floor.

I mention this more vertical way of thinking, from cup to table to floor to building to foundation to ground, and so on, because I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that we require something like an initial starting point, like a big bang, for all of this to exist as it does. Aristotle, for instance, believed in the Carl-Saganancity of a universe that always ways and will always be, as if time itself is not a creature, although I think it is.

An atemporal or vertical way of thinking about coffee helps us consider how various actualities depend on other actualities, which depend on other actualities in turn. Change cannot happen apart from this atemporal dependence. Moreover, each thing, which depends on other things at any given moment, clearly is not self-sustaining and self-supporting and so requires something else, which in turn is not self-sustaining or self-supporting. This is true at the microscopic and subatomic levels, too, as we dive into the coffee, its water and caffeine, molecules and atoms and quarks and gluons, and so on.

The obvious contingency of the thing—the fact that it is not self-supporting—doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly glaringly apparent the more you look at things. Not only does nothing fully account for itself, but nothing self-actualizes itself, including the subjects of Maslowian psychology. All potentials are actualized by things that are not the thing itself, even quite apart from some historical-temporal explanation. The potential of my coffee cup to be there, feet off the ground, is actualized, for instance, by the table it is on.

Now think, as much as you are able to, about everything. Think about the sum total of everything that exists. Metaphysically, we are asking about all of that, all of us included. If I am walking in a forest and I happen to come across a giant cup of coffee floating inexplicably in the middle of a beautiful clearing without apparent reason or support, I would be likely to ask the question of how it got there. Well, while that is no doubt disturbingly inexplicable, it is no less strange that there is anything at all here rather than nothing. It would be weird for a giant, unsupported coffee cup to be in the middle of a clearing in the forest, but it is far weirder that there is a giant, unsupported universe right in the middle of—well, in the middle of what exactly?

Here we are, and here everything is, and when you really think about it, rather than just taking it for granted, you discover that it is rather strange that anything exists at all, especially since everything in the system of the entire universe is clearly not a self-supporting thing. And it isn’t good enough to merely state the fact of everything’s self-evident presence, as scientistic atheists do, because the description in itself is not an explanation. If someone dies drinking poisoned coffee, as someone does in Keigo Higashino’s thoroughly enjoyable novel Salvation of a Saint, merely describing the crime scene is not sufficient to solve the question of who poisoned the victim and why. In other words, answering any question at one level is hard to answer on the required levels for the answer to be sufficient.

Nothing we know of in the universe is self-supporting, so why would the universe itself be self-supporting? It will also not do to constantly point to causes of change that are themselves open to change because then you have to simply point to another cause for change, which is itself also changing and changeable because, in that case, we are dealing not just with infinite regress but with the silly idea that just because you add yet another level to your hierarchy of being that you have in fact solved the problem—because you really haven’t. All you have done is defer it. This is why mechanical explanations don’t ultimately destroy mystery. Just because you know how a machine works doesn’t mean you have properly understood the mystical presence of the machine itself.

My point is this. We’re not just interested in what changes our coffee from warm to cold coffee. We are interested in why coffee exists in this very moment, as isolated from all other moments. We’re also not just asking about the chemical composition of coffee because that doesn’t answer the question; it merely rephrases it. We’re not thinking about history because that’s just another way to defer the question of being. We are asking the metaphysical question: Why is there coffee instead of nothing?

What actualizes the potential of the sum total of everything in the coffee as well as everything that is the universe? We’re interested in what actualizes the universe itself (and the coffee): what actualizes anything’s potential to be, given that everything is so obviously loaded with potential? We don’t really need to ask about the whole universe at all and how it came to be, of course. We need only ask about any simple, everyday thing, like a cup of coffee. Its thereness is astonishing, isn’t it?

To avoid infinite regress, we can now posit that there must be an Unactualised Actualiser, or what Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover. We need something that is so actual that it does not have any potential at all. As soon as something has a potential, after all, it would require something else to actualize that potential, and that would merely put us on the cosmic infinite regress path all over again. Thus, the Unactualised Actualiser would have to be absolutely unchangeable. It would need to have no parts because if it had parts, it would be dependent upon those parts for its existence, and we’d end up with yet more regress. It must be so real that it does not require anything else to explain its own reality.

If we’re taking the natural order of things as seriously as I’m trying to, then this is the only logical explanation available to any of us regarding why there is something rather than nothing, at least insofar as change is our main consideration. If you decide to contest this logic, your own logic would need to be on the basis of a more logical possibility.

We can, of course, simply settle for the fact that everything just is. We, at least most of us, can believe our senses and accept that they are not lying to us. But if we want an explanation and if we trust the basic inferential logic of how things depend on other things and that the sum total of all dependent things must require something singular and independent upon which everything can rest, it is not just possible but necessary to trust that an Unmoved Mover is the only possible answer. It is a logical necessity.

There are myriad ways to fine-tune the above argument, which is really the shortest version of it I could give without risking boring you. But I have another reason for bringing this up. And that reason is political. Because politics always rests on some or other metaphysics. This metaphysical division of being into actuality, the technical name being act, and potentiality, the technical name being potency, suggests a fantastic array of powers of actualization and potentiality.

Even in our most basic understanding of the world, we know that there are harmonious and inharmonious ways that act and potency can interact. Here’s a harmonious interactualisation: I drink the coffee, which ignites a little spark in me, and I move on to enjoy my day. Here’s an inharmonious version of this: I drink several cups of coffee in a row, and soon enough, I feel insanely anxious, become restless, get a headache, get dizzy, and my heart rate goes nuts. The political dimension of this simple interaction with coffee would be that my interactions with others, as now affected by my interaction with coffee, could be better or worse, depending on the proportion between actuality and potentiality in this specific interaction. Harmony, which is what we should be aiming for and which the ancients described in terms of the life of virtue, involves difficulties in our interactions, too, such as the difficulty of getting out of bed and making coffee. Why does it not make itself? Ah, yes, I’ve already implied an explanation for that.

Well, politics is much more complicated than this, of course. But you get the idea. It’s a matter not just of what interacts but also of a certain proportion between the things that interact. In some places and times, there has been harmony. As suggested in the Genesis story in the bible, harmony is achievable in terms of how certain aspects of creation allow for and limit each other. In her marvelous book, The Need for Roots, Simone Weil uses this principle to discuss certain needs for the soul, noting that “needs are arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance. Man requires food but also an interval between his meals; he requires warmth and coolness, rest, and exercise. Likewise, in the case of the soul’s needs.” She notes our soul needs a political order that balances liberty and responsibility, equality and hierarchism, honor and punishment, truth and freedom of opinion, security, and risk, as well as private property and collective property.

Arguably, there are reasonable ways to consider all such things. But, in our time, something glaringly bothersome makes even reasonable consideration close to impossible.

It’s worth noting that there are also things that have a certain kind of existence that are completely imaginary. Let’s imagine, say, coffee that tastes exactly like tea. I can throw these antithetical ideas together quite easily to create a pure logical possibility. This is not a real potential, of course, because it is not grounded in the nature of real things. It is fiction, which, even to be a fiction, must exist somewhere—that is, in my mind—even if it isn’t truly realizable. If my coffee really tasted like tea, it would actually be tea and not coffee. Just because it is thinkable does not mean it is actualisable.

Technically, then, we are dealing here with something that has so little actuality that it is nearly completely all potentiality. If a person were to believe that one can really actualize something that has no being, he would essentially be equating himself with the ultimate actuality. He would quite literally be thinking of himself as equal to God, who is not a mere logical potential but a logical necessity. While I grant that you may not accept the existence of God on the basis of anything like what I have said, even so, the vast majority of people would agree, given the degrees of actualizing power readily and even obviously perceptible in the world, that to assume the ability to call a new nature into existence by what amounts to sheer will is a rather astonishing sort of hubris.

But it is this very hubris that is at the heart of the entire liberal political project.  To look at our current political moment both metaphysically and historically, we start to see that alarmingly far back, even before Sartre inverted essence and existence, the modern project was already obsessively concerned with falsification. The idea that we can only determine what is true after antagonizing being, which is what modern science does, is already to place actuality at the service of potentiality. But this idea leaked into everything, including theology, philosophy, and culture.

Way back, the conception of personhood in the heads of nominalists, even before Descartes, was already tending to think of logical possibility—meaning a pure object of thought without any material being—as superior in a way to potency proper. The conception of personhood at play was one of pure thought imaginatively but not actually cut off from reality. It was a blank slate before Locke and Rousseau. It was, in short, a fiction. Its reality was rooted not in being and its natural division of act and potency but in the mind, which can easily invert that division without even noticing that it is an inversion.

Politics, for a long time now, has been de-ontologized. It’s why it’s so easy to get caught up in political discussions that have almost nothing to do with actual political concerns; that is, with what it means to live well in the world, given that we interact with and intellectualize each other, and given that we even have the potential to denigrate each other if we cannot perceive harmonious interactions wisely. Theoretical relations are now more commonly entertained than real relations.

Sure, you could look at this lengthy meditation and accuse me of doing the same. But, part of why I have traversed the whole universe, from my coffee cup to God to the realm of the political, is because I ultimately have a very simple point to make. The political has to be, in the richest sense, universal. But the truly universal is not a false universal absolutely ripped from context. It is intimate as well. It pertains to various actualities and how they play off each other and give of themselves to each other. It pertains to the lives we really live. And the truth is that where the so-called political yanks us away from concrete particulars, it is no longer really political. It destroys the tensions between those antithetical pairs that Weil mentions without even considering what they mean, we cannot figure out what it means to live together, and we cannot possibly encounter wholeness. Right now, what is being sacrificed for the sake of so many fictions, the absolute fiction of money included, is everything from families to nations to harmonious geopolitical solutions, all in the name of reconceptualizing the world as a realm of pure artificiality.

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