Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Softcover

Weaver, Richard M.; Kimball, Roger; Smith, Ted J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022609006X ISBN 13: 9780226090061

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

Originally published in 1948, at the height of post–World War II optimism and confidence in collective security, Ideas Have Consequences uses “words hard as cannonballs” to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. Widely read and debated at the time of its first publication,the book is now seen asone of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement.

In its pages, Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights. But Weaver also offers a realistic remedy. These difficulties are the product not of necessity, but of intelligent choice. And, today, as decades ago, the remedy lies in the renewed acceptance of absolute reality and the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences.

This expanded edition of the classic work contains a foreword by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball that offers insight into the rich intellectual and historical contexts of Weaver and his work and an afterword by Ted J. Smith III that relates the remarkable story of the book’s writing and publication.

About this title

About the Author

Richard M. Weaver (1910-63) was an American scholar, revered conservative, and professor of English and rhetoric at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including The Ethics of Rhetoric and Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

By Richard M. Weaver

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-09006-1

Contents

Foreword to the Expanded Edition...........................................
The Consequences of Richard Weaver / By Roger Kimball......................
vii
Foreword / By Richard M. Weave.............................................
xix
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 The Unsentimental Sentiment..............................................
17
2 Distinction and Hierarchy................................................
32
3 Fragmentation and Obsession..............................................
48
4 Egotism in Work and Art..................................................
64
5 The Great Stereopticon...................................................
84
6 The Spoiled-Child Psychology.............................................
103
7 The Last Metaphysical Right..............................................
117
8 The Power of the Word....................................................
134
9 Piety and Justice........................................................
153
Afterword..................................................................
How Ideas Have Consequences................................................
Came to Be Written / By Ted J. Smith III...................................
169
Acknowledgments............................................................
193
Notes......................................................................
195

CHAPTER 1

The Unsentimental Sentiment

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is oftenenough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others);the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain,concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and hisduty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him,and creatively determines all the rest.

CARLYLE

Every man participating in a culture has three levels of consciousreflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs orconvictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.

The first of these are the thoughts he employs in the activity ofdaily living; they direct his disposition of immediate matters and,so, constitute his worldliness. One can exist on this level alonefor limited periods, though pure worldliness must eventually bringdisharmony and conflict.

Above this lies his body of beliefs, some of which may be heritagessimply, but others of which he will have acquired in the ordinarycourse of his reflection. Even the simplest souls define a fewrudimentary conceptions about the world, which they repeatedlyapply as choices present themselves. These, too, however, rest onsomething more general.

Surmounting all is an intuitive feeling about the immanent natureof reality, and this is the sanction to which both ideas andbeliefs are ultimately referred for verification. Without the metaphysicaldream it is impossible to think of men living together harmoniouslyover an extent of time. The dream carries with it anevaluation, which is the bond of spiritual community.

When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we areaffirming in effect that sentiment is anterior to reason. We do notundertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn toit by an affective interest. In the cultural life of man, therefore,the fact of paramount importance about anyone is his attitude towardthe world. How frequently it is brought to our attention thatnothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone failsto justify itself. Not without cause has the devil been called theprince of lawyers, and not by accident are Shakespeare's villainsgood reasoners. If the disposition is wrong, reason increases maleficence;if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good. We haveno authority to argue anything of a social or political nature unlesswe have shown by our primary volition that we approve someaspects of the existing world. The position is arbitrary in the sensethat here is a proposition behind which there stands no prior. Webegin our other affirmations after a categorical statement that lifeand the world are to be cherished.

It appears, then, that culture is originally a matter of yea-saying,and thus we can understand why its most splendid flourishingstands often in proximity with the primitive phase of a people, inwhich there are powerful feelings of "oughtness" directed towardthe world, and before the failure of nerve has begun.

Simple approbation is the initial step only; a developed cultureis a way of looking at the world through an aggregation of symbols,so that empirical facts take on significance and man feels thathe is acting in a drama, in which the cruxes of decision sustaininterest and maintain the tone of his being. For this reason a trueculture cannot be content with a sentiment which is sentimentalwith regard to the world. There must be a source of clarification,of arrangement and hierarchy, which will provide grounds for theemployment of the rational faculty. Now man first begins this clarificationwhen he becomes mythologist, and Aristotle has notedthe close relationship between myth-making and philosophy. Thispoetry of representation, depicting an ideal world, is a great cohesiveforce, binding whole peoples to the acceptance of a design andfusing their imaginative life. Afterward comes the philosopher,who points out the necessary connection between phenomena, yetwho may, at the other end, leave the pedestrian level to talk aboutfinal destination.

Thus, in the reality of his existence, man is impelled from behindby the life-affirming sentiment and drawn forward by someconception of what he should be. The extent to which his life isshaped, in between these, by the conditions of the physical worldis indeterminable, and so many supposed limitations have beentranscended that we must at least allow the possibility that volitionhas some influence upon them.

The most important goal for one to arrive at is this imaginativepicture of what is otherwise a brute empirical fact, the donnéeof the world. His rational faculty will then be in the serviceof a vision which can preserve his sentiment from sentimentality.There is no significance to the sound and fury of his life, as ofa stage tragedy, unless something is being affirmed by the completeaction. And we can say of one as of the other that the actionmust be within bounds of reason if our feeling toward it is to beinformed and proportioned, which is a way of saying, if it is tobe just. The philosophically ignorant vitiate their own actions byfailing to observe measure. This explains why precultural periodsare characterized by formlessness and post-cultural by the clashingof forms. The darkling plain, swept by alarms, which threatens tobe the world of our future, is an arena in which conflicting ideas,numerous after the accumulation of centuries, are freed from thediscipline earlier imposed by ultimate conceptions. The decline isto confusion; we are agitated by sensation and look with wonderupon the serene somnambulistic creations of souls which had themetaphysical anchorage. Our ideas become convenient perceptions,and we accept contradiction because we no longer feel thenecessity of relating thoughts to the metaphysical dream.

It must be apparent that logic depends upon the dream, and notthe dream upon it. We must admit this when we realize that logicalprocesses rest ultimately on classification, that classification isby identification, and that identification is intuitive. It follows thenthat a waning of the dream results in confusion of counsel, suchas we behold on all sides in our time. Whether we describe thisas decay of religion or loss of interest in metaphysics, the resultis the same; for both are centers with power to integrate, and, ifthey give way, there begins a dispersion which never ends until theculture lies in fragments. There can be no doubt that the enormousexertions made by the Middle Ages to preserve a common worldview—exertions which took forms incomprehensible to modernman because he does not understand what is always at stake undersuch circumstances—signified a greater awareness of realitiesthan our leaders exhibit today. The Schoolmen understood thatthe question, universalia ante rem or universalia post rem, or thequestion of how many angels can stand on the point of a needle,so often cited as examples of Scholastic futility, had incalculableramifications, so that, unless there was agreement upon these questions,unity in practical matters was impossible. For the answersupplied that with which they bound up their world; the groundof this answer was the fount of understanding and of evaluation;it gave the heuristic principle by which societies and arts could beapproved and regulated. It made one's sentiment toward the worldrational, with the result that it could be applied to situations withoutplunging man into sentimentality on the one hand or brutalityon the other.

The imposition of this ideational pattern upon conduct relievesus of the direful recourse to pragmatic justification. Here, indeed,lies the beginning of self-control, which is a victory of transcendence.When a man chooses to follow something which is arbitraryas far as the uses of the world go, he is performing a featof abstraction; he is recognizing the noumenal, and it is this, andnot that self-flattery which takes the form of a study of his ownachievements, that dignifies him.

Such is the wisdom of many oracular sayings: man loses himselfin order to find himself; he conceptualizes in order to avoid an immersionin nature. It is our destiny to be faced originally with theworld as our primary datum but not to end our course with onlya wealth of sense impressions. In the same way that our cognitionpasses from a report of particular details to a knowledge of universals,so our sentiments pass from a welter of feeling to an illuminedconcept of what one ought to feel. This is what is known asrefinement. Man is in the world to suffer his passion; but wisdomcomes to his relief with an offer of conventions, which shape andelevate that passion. The task of the creators of culture is to furnishthe molds and the frames to resist that "sinking in upon themoral being" which comes of accepting raw experience. Withoutthe transcendental truth of mythology and metaphysics, that taskis impossible. One imagines that Jacob Burckhardt had a similarthought in mind when he said, "Yet there remains with us the feelingthat all poetry and all intellectual life were once the handmaidsof the holy, and have passed through the temple."

The man of self-control is he who can consistently perform thefeat of abstraction. He is therefore trained to see things under theaspect of eternity, because form is the enduring part. Thus we invariablyfind in the man of true culture a deep respect for forms.He approaches even those he does not understand with awarenessthat a deep thought lies in an old observance. Such respect distinguisheshim from the barbarian, on the one hand, and the degenerate,on the other. The truth can be expressed in another way bysaying that the man of culture has a sense of style. Style requiresmeasure, whether in space or time, for measure imparts structure,and it is structure which is essential to intellectual apprehension.

That it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heardon every side today. The statement carries a fearful implication. Ifa man is a philosopher in the sense with which we started, whathe believes tells him what the world is for. How can men whodisagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiaeof daily conduct? The statement really means that it does notmatter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefsseriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religiousbelief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he doestake his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stampupon his experience, and he belongs to a culture, which is a leaguefounded on exclusive principles. To become eligible, one must beable to say the right words about the right things, which signifiesin turn that one must be a man of correct sentiments. This phrase,so dear to the eighteenth century, carries us back to the last agethat saw sentiment and reason in a proper partnership.

That culture is sentiment refined and measured by intellect becomesclear as we turn our attention to a kind of barbarism appearingin our midst and carrying unmistakable power to disintegrate.This threat is best described as the desire of immediacy, forits aim is to dissolve the formal aspects of everything and to getat the supposititious reality behind them. It is characteristic of thebarbarian, whether he appears in a precultural stage or emergesfrom below into the waning day of a civilization, to insist uponseeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing inhimself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thingto thing without the intercession of imagination. Impatient of theveiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginativemeaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarianliving amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Wherethe former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starknessof materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

There is no need to speak of Vandals and Goths; since our concernis with the "vertical invasion of the barbarians" in our own time,I shall cite an instance from the modern period—and from theUnited States, so symbolical of the world of the future.The American frontiersman was a type who emancipated himselffrom culture by abandoning the settled institutions of the seaboardand the European motherland. Reveling in the new absenceof restraint, he associated all kinds of forms with the machinery ofoppression which he had fled and was now preparing to opposepolitically. His emancipation left him impatient of symbolism, ofindirect methods, and even of those inclosures of privacy which allcivilized communities respect. De Tocqueville made the followingobservation of such freedmen: "As it is on their own testimony thatthey are accustomed to rely, they like to discern the object whichengages their attention with extreme clearness; they therefore stripoff as much as possible all that covers it, they rid themselves ofwhatever separates them from it, they remove whatever concealsit from sight, in order to view it more closely in the broad light ofday. This disposition of mind soon leads them to contemn forms,which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed betweenthem and the truth."

The frontiersman was seeking a solvent of forms, and he foundhis spokesmen in such writers as Mark Twain, a large part ofwhose work is simply a satire upon the more formal Europeanway of doing things. As the impulse moved eastward, it encourageda belief that the formal was the outmoded or at least theun-American. A plebeian distrust of forms, flowering in eulogies ofplainness, became the characteristic American mentality.

Has America vulgarized Europe, or has Europe corruptedAmerica? There is no answer to this question, for each has in itsown way yielded to the same impulse. Europe long ago beganthe expenditure of its great inheritance of medieval forms, so thatBurke, in the late eighteenth century, was sharply aware that the"unbought grace of life" was disappearing. America is responsiblefor the vulgarization of the Old World only in the sense that, like aforcing house, it brought the impulses to fruition sooner. It enjoysthe dubious honor of a foremost place in the procession. Todayover the entire world there are dangerous signs that culture, assuch, is marked for attack because its formal requirements standin the way of expression of the natural man.

Many cannot conceive why form should be allowed to impedethe expression of honest hearts. The reason lies in one of the limitationsimposed upon man: unformed expression is ever tendingtoward ignorance. Good intention is primary, but it is not enough:that is the lesson of the experiment of romanticism.

The member of a culture, on the other hand, purposely avoidsthe relationship of immediacy; he wants the object somehow depictedand fictionized, or, as Schopenhauer expressed it, he wantsnot the thing but the idea of the thing. He is embarrassed whenthis is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presentedbare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which hiswhole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventionsare the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of theman of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside someveil which is half adornment, half concealment. He understandswhat is being done, but he cannot convey the understanding becausehe cannot convey the idea of sacrilege. His cries of abesteprofani are not heard by those who in the exhilaration of breakingsome restraint feel that they are extending the boundaries of poweror of knowledge.

Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced that itspredecessors were fearful of reality. It looks upon euphemisms andall the veils of decency with which things were previously drapedas obstructions which it, with superior wisdom and praiseworthycourage, will now strip away. Imagination and indirection it identifieswith obscurantism; the mediate is an enemy to freedom. Onecan see this in even a brief lapse of time; how the man of todaylooks with derision upon the prohibitions of the 1890's and supposesthat the violation of them has been without penalty!

He would suffer poignant disillusion had he a clear enough patternin his soul to be able to measure differences; but one consequenceof this debauchery, as we shall see, is that man loses discrimination.For, when these veils are stripped aside, we find noreality behind them, or, at best, we find a reality of such commonplacenessthat we would willingly undo our little act of brashness.Those will realize, who are capable of reflection, that the realitywhich excites us is an idea, of which the indirection, the veiling,the withholding, is part. It is our various supposals about a matterwhich give it meaning, and not some intrinsic property which canbe seized in the barehanded fashion of the barbarian. In a wonderfullyprescient passage Burke foretold the results of such positivismwhen it was first unleashed by the French Revolution: "Allthe pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedienceliberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which,by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentimentswhich beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved bythis new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decentdrapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas,furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which theheart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to coverthe defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignityin our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd,and antiquated fashion."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022609006X
• ISBN 13: 9780226090061
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 223