Monday, June 16, 2014

The sound of silence …

… Edward Feser on John Gray: Silence Speaks



This is an outstanding review, if only because of the fairness and precision with which summarizes views he obviously does not share. Consider this: 
Skepticism was a key element of Gray’s thought even in his right-wing period, and it made for an interesting variation on Reagan- and Thatcher-era conservatism. In his important book Hayek on Liberty (1984), which was praised by Friedrich Hayek himself, Gray sympathetically set out Hayek’s position that there are limitations in principle on our ability to understand the function served by inherited social rules, so that we ought to be very wary of tampering with these rules in a large-scale way after the fashion of economic planners and social engineers. Gray would go on to argue in Enlightenment’s Wake (1995) that contemporary conservatives’ warm embrace of modern capitalism has led them to overlook the ways in which market forces, like leftist planners, can undermine inherited social rules and traditional communities, and have thereby fostered subjectivist and antinomian tendencies within modern Western society. Like socialist utopianism, the fusionist synthesis of traditional morality and the free market is in Gray’s view a rationalist fantasy. 
What a marvelous prècis. As it happens, Feser's objections notwithstanding, I find myself more in sympathy with Gray. I honor reason as a wondrous faculty. I employ it all the time. I simply no longer think it is the arbiter of truth its advocates claim. Insofar as language can give expression to what I have come to think of as the transcendent ambiguity of being, it is by means of the synergy provided by poetry. Thought figures, of course. But we are dependent on revelation to get at the heart of things.

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