Burke's historical morality.

• Author: Holston, Ryan
• Position: Edmund Burke - Essay

The precise meaning of the terms "historical understanding," "historical sense," or "historical consciousness" can vary greatly, but they are generally understood as referring to an awareness of the dependence of human existence on the development of events that have taken place in the past. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of thinkers from various fields of study, whose early expositors include Vico, Burke, Herder, Hegel, and Nietzsche, began to explore this theme. Along with this fundamental insight came the related understanding of the fact that the political choices we face, our language, our meanings, and our values, are embeded within and contingent upon unique, present circumstances. Despite the emergence of an increasingly widespread historical sensibility among philosophers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the further implications of these basic insights remain unclear and disputed. Consequently, many modern thinkers who share what may be broadly described as a historicist orientation nonetheless disagree on much else, including the implications of our historicity for human knowledge, freedom, and morals. Much of this article is therefore devoted to identifying a particular strain of historicism and defending it as an approach to thinking about morality and moral decision-making. The article will proceed by first introducing some of the historical aspects of Burke's thinking and a unique brand of historicism that his thought inspires. It will then look more closely at the implications of this Burkean-inspired historical consciousness for an understanding of morality. Finally, it will explore how the past continues to "live" in the present insofar as it shapes the thought and action of moral decision-makers.

Interpreting Burke

Since the early 1950s, the scholarly attention focused on the thinking of Burke has been marked by two dominant strains of interprestion. (1) First is the critical reading of Burke penned by Leo Strauss in his now famous tract Natural Right and History, in which he sets forth a defense of what he terms" classic natural right." (2) The troubling development in modern thinking, according to Strauss, is the tendency toward historical consciousness, which has led to the relativization of all standards or claims to right or justice once the latter were viewed as the mere accidents of history or convention. The charge that Burke is substantially responsible for this development is leveled in the final pages of this text, where Strauss is at pains to establish Burke's credentials as a modern thinker. According to Strauss, Burke's opposition to French rationalism "parts company with the Aristotelian tradition by disparaging theory and especially metaphysics." (3) Moreover, by stressing the importance of tradition, "Burke's political theory is, or tends to become, identical with a theory of the British constitution, i.e., an attempt to 'discover the latent wisdom which prevails' in the actual, " (4) thus deriving its normative authority from the mere accident of its historical evolution. That a tradition, as such, can take on this normative authority is not only mistaken, for Strauss, but leads to the deleterious transformation of political thought from the study of that which ought to be into the mere understanding of the actual or what is. (5) Once traditions are assumed to be just, simply by virtue of their survival or existence, Strauss questions how any can be deemed morally deficient. He claims that, by making "ought" dependent upon "is" in this manner, Burke sows the seeds of the moral relativism that later emerges in nineteenth-century German philosophy, whose more thoroughgoing historicism proceeds to view all normative claims as contingent upon their particular, historical contexts.

In marked contrast to this view, the reading of Burke put forth by Peter Stanlis and Francis P. Canavan places his thinking squarely within the canon of traditional natural law theory. Stanlis, for example, relies more heavily than Strauss on the distinction between natural law as conceived by the ancients and Aquinas and that put forth by the modern natural rights philosophers of the Enlightenment, claiming that Burke is much closer in his thinking to the former than the latter. Stanlis maintains that, while the older doctrine is capable of taking tradition and historical experience into account, the newer doctrine that culminates in the thinking of the philosophes is much more abstract. Therefore, when Burke famously rails against the "clumsy...political metaphysics" (6) of the French radicals, Stanlis thinks it is not metaphysical reasoning per se that is the object of Burke's criticism, but the particularly dangerous, abstract form of metaphysics that he sees ravaging France and threatening all of Europe. Providing an abundance of textual support for his thesis, Stanlis counters the notion that Burke was an anti-metaphysical thinker. He argues that, far from disparaging metaphysics, Burke was unwavering in his adherence to the classical and Scholastic tradition of natural law thinking, so thoroughly that Stanlis even denies any "development" of this tendency in Burke's thought. He marvels: "What was most remarkable in Burke was the sustained consistency of the Natural Law in his thought and career." (7)

That such dissimilar readings of the same thinker are plausible points to the severity of the apparent tensions residing within the corpus of Burke's work. On the one hand, Burke is comfortable speaking in the language of natural law and, in this respect, he does appear to echo the classical, metaphysical conception of a universal hierarchy of ends whose normative authority supports what is right and just in the world. On the other hand, Burke's concern for a pragmatic awareness of circumstance, together with his historical sense, appears to signal a new development in the theory of knowledge and in morals that ought not to be dismissed as merely realigning the natural law tradition with its experiential strain. Will Herberg dubs this tension "the Burkean paradox" and succinctly poses the problematic as follows: "How can a man be an advocate of expediency and an apostle of principle at one and the same time? How can he, for example, excoriate the French Declaration of the Rights of Man as 'abstract' and 'metaphysical' in almost the same breath that he denounces the French revolutionaries for their crimes against 'the eternal immutable law'?" (8)

Rejecting interpretations that tend to emphasize either of these aspects of Burke's thinking at the expense of the other, this article argues that it is possible to conceive of Burke as laying the foundation for a historically informed understanding of morals, which sees them as existing concretely in human conduct. Noting that Burke fits neatly into neither category, natural lawyer nor historical relativist, Claes Ryn has argued that Burke's thought points toward the possibility of synthesis between historical existence and a universal moral order. Burke's thinking thus serves as the inspiration for a moral theory developed by Ryn, which he terms "value-centered historicism." According to this theory, Burke's fundamental insight is "[seeing] the transcendent moral order as potentially inhering in history." (9) In other words, Burke expresses an awareness of the importance of historical context and particularity in human existence. However, rather than inferring the relativity of morals, Ryn suggests a novel understanding of morality that sees it as manifested diversely in concrete human experiences. He explains this insight:

It is possible to reconcile the acceptance of universality with a historicist appreciation for the particularity, diversity, and changeability of human existence. What is here called value-centered historicism refers precisely to the needed reconstitution and synthesis of philosophical elements. In this form of historicism real universality is not separated from the particulars of history; universality is seen as present to human consciousness in concrete form. Ethical universality is at the same time transcendent of historical experience and immanent in it. (10) This appropriation of Burke and the unique form of historicism that it inspires has significant implications for the way in which we conceive of morality and moral decision-making. Consequently, the remainder of this article will focus on demonstrating in greater detail what it means to bring history to bear on morality in this way. The new understanding will be compared and contrasted with both traditional, intellectualist notions of morality and more thoroughgoing varieties of historicism.

The Contextual Character of Morality

The fundamental idea behind the concept of value-centered historicism is that the good can be located, "not in abstract theoretical 'principles' or other a historical judgment or vision, but in concrete experience; that normative authority, in so far as it exists for man, resides in historical particularity." (11) While Hegel is perhaps better known for pioneering the idea that the normative is capable of such concretization or instantiation within phenomenal experience, it is Burke who, earlier, introduces this idea to the English-speaking world through his writings on politics. Moreover, he does so without the unfortunate rationalist tendencies that characterize Hegel's thinking. I Iegel's progressivist philosophy of history, which ultimately sees normative reason as ubiquitous, culminates in a pantheistic form of rationalism that makes distinctions between good and evil problematic. However, in avoiding--indeed, in combating--such rationalist tendencies, Burke is able to discern the variegation and complexity within the concrete normativity that the observes. He asserts that "steady, independent minds ... will judge of human institutions as they do of human characters. They will sort our the good...