The Contemplation of Order

Ordem e progresso. Order and progress. To my knowledge, the Brazilian national flag is the only one that displays the motto of a philosophical school, or, rather, a philosophical church. The flag’s designer, Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, belonged to the Positivist Church of Brazil, an offshoot of Auguste Comte’s religion of humanity, which had found fertile ground in South America. The dyad “order-progress” is the core of the bourgeois worldview, and, in many ways, Comtean positivism was the philosophy of the triumphant bourgeoisie in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Positivism’s birth, however, dates to the age of the restoration, when European society had striven to restore order after the great turmoil of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Historians of ideas have shown how much Comte owed to the Catholic reactionary authors of the previous generation, “the immortal retrograde school under the noble presidency of De Maistre, completed by De Bonald, of which I appropriated from the beginning all the essential principles, which today find no appreciation except in the Positivist school.” In particular, he shared with them the goal of restoring a unified society modeled after Medieval Christendom, the only difference being that this society would be unified not by Christianity but by “sociology” and the religion of humanity.

Those who love being, love as much being as they can, and thereby love according to order.

Today we smile at Comte’s conceit of being the founder and first Pope of the Church of Humanity, but we should recognize the enduring significance of his ideas. In fact, contemporary Western history displays some similarities with the age of Comte, the most important being, in my view, that we, like him, live in a post-revolutionary situation and feel acutely (albeit not always consciously) the question of a possible “restoration of order.” Our world is still very much shaped by the revolutions of the early-to-mid 20^th century: the 1917 Leninist revolution, the Fascist and Nazi responses, and finally, after World War II, what Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce called the “last bourgeois revolution,” beginning with the sexual revolution in the 1950s and culminating in the widespread rejection of the old European-Christian world in the 60s and 70s. Philosophically, this final “Western” revolution combined ideas drawn from the old Enlightenment (i.e., scientism, progressivism) with Marxist ideas, producing various Western-Marxist or Freudo-Marxist hybrids. It was still a manifestation, however, of the general mindset inherited from the 19^th century that Del Noce calls “revolutionary thought.” 

The Revolutionary Rejection of Order

For Del Noce, the notion of “revolution” that pervades the modern age is tied to a deeper metaphysical vision. A revolution is not just a political transformation that takes place within an enduring framework of principles and values that direct political change. Rather, it implies that the principles and values themselves must be swept away so that a “new world” may be born. It is a political extension (starting with Marx) of the Hegelian “metaphysics of becoming” in which truth is understood “not as a substance but as a process.” The ultimate expression of this metaphysics is the idea of a “total revolution” that will completely erase the existing order. This is the opposite of the traditional vision whereby political change is a corrective action aimed at realigning the world with a transcendent order. Indeed, “the idea of total revolution means replacing the search for metaphysical truth and the resulting moral obligation, as conformity to the order of being, with the search for a meta-humanity.”[1] The total revolution does not just seek a more just society; it looks forward to the rise of a “new man.” Therefore, in Del Noce’s view, revolutionary thought has a distinctively “Gnostic” religious flavor: 

The scholars of Gnosticism have identified the rebellion against the idea of cosmic order as its essential characteristic. The Gnostics do not deny to the world the attribute of order, but they interpret it as an abomination rather than a good. They do not say that the cosmos is disordered, but that it is governed by a rigid and hostile order, by a tyrannical and cruel law. Their God is not just outside and beyond the world, but against the world, and this is where they break away from Christianity. Moral r­ebellion reflects a metaphysical rebellion.[2] 

Ultimately, the revolutionary rebellion enters a crisis, which Del Noce calls the “suicide of the revolution.” By this, he does not mean to say that revolutions fail, but instead that at the moment of victory they self-destruct, because the new world fails to materialize: “The revolutionary idea entails the unity of two moments, a negative one as devaluation of the traditional order of values and a positive one as the establishment of a new order. The suicide occurs if in the process of realization the two moments split, and they must do so by necessity. Then, instead of transitioning to the new order, we fall back into the old order, but completely desecrated.”[3]

The Neo-Bourgeois Restoration of Order

The “neo-liberal” and globalized world in which we have lived for roughly half a century is an example of such “old” but “completely desecrated” order. It is a fully victorious bourgeois society in the twofold sense of having freed itself from all remnants of Christianity (e.g. Kantian ethics in the nineteenth century) and having defeated Marxism. As Del Noce explains, “The bourgeois is the man of order and progress. In order for him to achieve complete success, order and progress had to be dissociated from both metaphysics and the revolution. Once every reference to metaphysical transcendence has been eliminated, the existing order is legitimized not in relation to absolute principles (the principles which made it possible to criticize such an order), but simply because it exists.”[4]

“Order” now means the order of a universal market, which has expanded not only geographically but also conceptually, because in a world devoid of transcendence everything becomes an object of trade. It is “order-for-the-sake-of-order,” a “pure exercise of power, separated from any authority of values; hence, a tyranny that pretends not to be one because it conceals itself as group tyranny, in which the people in charge remain hidden.” Conversely, all forms of opposition can only pursue “disorder-for-the-sake-of-disorder,” Del Noce’s formula to describe the student rebels of 1968 who “accurately perceived that the current order is oppressive; but since they did not trace back their criticism to its original principle, their protest became the ‘failed revolution,’ because it was pure disorder.”[5]

What does it mean to trace the current order back to its original principle? It means simultaneously calling into question the metaphysics of becoming that underpins revolutionary thought and the oppressive order that follows the suicide of the revolution. This can only be done by reaffirming what Del Noce calls a “metaphysics of being,” namely “the traditional view that values are immutable, that they possess an objective reality which . . . is tied to a metaphysical-theological conception of an objective order of being, such that morality consists in respecting it. According to this view, there is . . . a universal and eternal reason, higher than man, which provides the foundation for the hierarchy and the absoluteness of values.”[6] A clear implication of this view is that politics can be based on objective, absolute values, a claim commonly dismissed as “authoritarian” by contemporary liberalism, which is committed to a sort of foundational relativism about values.

The Primacy of Contemplation

Del Noce believes that politics founded on a metaphysics of being is perfectly compatible with freedom (correctly understood) if one realizes that the objective order of being must be, before all else, beheld, contemplated. Precisely because it is not a human creation, it cannot simply be imposed by political means. Instead, its serving as the basis for restoration is tied to what Pope Benedict XVI called a “broadening of reason,” the recovery of reason’s capacity to recognize and love being. In Del Noce’s words:

Primacy of contemplation just means the superiority of the immutable over the changeable. It just expresses the essential metaphysical principle of the Catholic tradition, which says that everything that is participates necessarily in universal principles, which are the eternal and immutable essences contained in the permanent actuality of the divine intellect. So that all things—no matter how contingent they may be in themselves—translate or represent the principles in their own way and according to their order of existence, because otherwise they would just be pure nothingness. Hence we see that primacy of contemplation absolutely does not mean, as somebody may be tempted to think, inactivity.[7]

To this end, Del Noce proposes Blessed Antonio Rosmini as a philosophical guide. Rosmini was the great Catholic contemporary of Marx and Comte, and someone who sought to respond to the challenges posed by modern thought by deepening the Catholic intellectual tradition. For Del Noce, what makes him exceptionally relevant is that “Rosmini . . . is the philosopher of a Restoration, without any trace of ‘reaction’ in the sense of idolizing a past historical order. [He] regards theologically infused being, immanent in the dialectics of life, as the foundational element of order, so that order calls out for an authoritative presence of being and is an epiphany of being itself.”[8] In other words, Rosmini does not associate the restoration of order with a return to the past, but with a recovery of the ontological foundations of order itself. Del Noce regards Rosmini’s Principles of Moral Science as “The greatest work of philosophy of the modern times . . . precisely because it is based on the primacy of contemplation (of the ideal order which is the object of speculative esteem, to which practical esteem must conform).”[9]

Morality as Love of Being

In Principles of Moral Science, Rosmini builds his ethical system around the fundamental premise of his philosophy, which is the identification of intelligible (or “ideal”) being with the light of reason.[10] As Étienne Gilson explains, for Rosmini the “intellect [is] constituted by the soul’s intuition of being.”[11] Translated to the ethical sphere, this means that morality is fundamentally love of being. However, being presents itself to reason as ordered. “Those who love being, love as much being as they can, and thereby love according to order.”[12] Initially, we discover goodness as the power that beings have to produce pleasurable, positive sensations. These sensations come in different degrees, and we find that beings “can be found in a number of different states,” some more perfect than others. The experience of greater good is simply the experience of more complete being: 

In the first place, in each thing there can be a sequence of goods, starting from its first and most imperfect existence, and proceeding to its final development and fulfillment. In the second place, all these growings of the thing, all these additions that go to complete it and make it fuller, are nothing but as many acts of its being, as many degrees if its entity. So that we can rightly conclude with the sentence of all of antiquity, that every thing is good inasmuch as it is, and inasmuch as it is not, it is bad. Therefore, the good is the same as being; good is simply being, being realizes itself, actualizes itself, it develops: in actualizing itself, in developing it has an intrinsic and necessary order, whose reason cannot be found except in [being] itself . . . Being and good are thus the same, except that the good is being considered in its order, which is recognized by intelligence, which by knowing it draws pleasure from it.[13]

Rosmini further distinguishes between subjective good, which pertains to the happiness of the subject, and objective good, which is good recognized as such. The former is the object of the science of happiness (“eudemonology”) whereas the latter is the proper object of morality.  As such, morality is universal and disinterested: 

Morally good man loves good for its own sake, in its own nature as good, precisely as intelligence shows it to him, and so loves it everywhere it shows it to him; therefore he loves all goods, and from their contemplation draws, willing it, that noble and pure gladness which is the natural effect of knowing good in an intelligent and good being . . . and so since the formula of intelligence is to see universal being, likewise the formula of morality is universal love, love for all beings, love that extends as much as cognition extends, i.e. to infinity.[14]

By identifying the moral good with ordered good and by further identifying the order of the goods with the intrinsic order of being, Rosmini aims to clarify the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition that located the principle of morality in following the light of reason, precisely because the light of reason is the intuition of being. “Thus man sees being with his intelligence, and seeing being sees the order of being, and such being is the good; and the will that loves being and the order of being is the good will, the will that wills good, and that by willing it makes it moral. Thus the formula of ethics ‘Follow the light of reason’ loses some of its vagueness and begins, by what we have said, to become more precise and more determinate, since now it can be translated in this other one: ‘Will, that is, love being wherever you know it, in the order in which it presents itself to your intelligence.’”[15] Gilson comments: 

“Such is the great principle of Rosmini’s ethics. . . . one must love being wherever it is found . . . the perfect formula of an ethics pure a priori like that of Kant, yet realistic like that of Thomas Aquinas . . . An ethics in which ‘obligation’ and ‘duty’ find their foundation in the apprehension of ordered being by the natural light of reason is not a blind categoric imperative, but the free love of God acknowledged by intelligence and determined by reason. Here is the basis for a society organized in view of the full development of moral persons.”[16]

Order and Freedom

This brief exposition of Rosmini’s ethics was meant to clarify why Del Noce, among others, saw it as a prototype of the kind of approach that is needed for any realistic and truly human “restoration of order” in the modern world. By founding ethics on the love of ordered being, Rosmini addresses what is arguably the greatest concern of the modern age: freedom. In our post-revolutionary bourgeois society this concern has deteriorated into an a priori rejection of all authorities and of any order not established by man. Even the notion of a “natural order” has become suspicious, as potentially “authoritarian” or even “fascistic.” Our society abhors the very idea of sacrifice, of “sacrum fecere” and identifies authority with power. It only knows the “principle of ‘self-realization,’ as a principle separated from any respect for a universal moral order. We have here a perversion of another fundamental moral notion, that of freedom. The recognition of the freedom of the other person—as long as he conforms to the rule ‘be yourself’—presents itself as correlative with the non-­recognition of the universal order.”[17]

On the contrary, from a Rosminian perspective the existence of an order of being recognizable by reason is the transcendental condition for freedom (to use Kantian language). Indeed, if reality is ordered according to the fullness of being, and thus of lovability, human freedom is fulfilled by “loving being in the order in which it presents itself.” The impression of a conflict between freedom and sacrifice disappears because “insofar as I conform my action to an uncreated order, which guides divine creation, I participate in creation and I am somehow a co-creator; and the surplus of vitality that is my full realization follows from the relative mortification of conforming to an order that transcends me. It is a mortification in the sense that it seems a sacrifice with respect to the level I have left behind, not with respect to the one I have reached.”[18] Likewise, the conflict between freedom and authority is overcome, because it turns out that genuine authority “differs from power because its essence is to set in order.”[19]

Nowadays people complain about seemingly intractable political polarization, and attribute it either to a failure of civility or to political fanaticism. From Del Noce’s and Rosmini’s perspective, the true failure we are facing, in the wake of last century’s “total revolution,” is a failure of intelligence. Not intelligence in a narrow technical or practical sense, but intelligence of being, the ability to see reality in its complexity and to discern an order of goods. When a society possesses this type of intelligence, politics is relativized and becomes a question of means, because common ground can be found about the ends. When this intelligence is lacking, political ends can only be established voluntaristically and justified ideologically. All there is, is power, even when it professes to aim at restoring order. Conversely, a true restoration of order is entirely dependent on a restoration of the intelligence of being. This has the disadvantage of being a metapolitical question, because a process of education is needed. It has the advantage of relying on the deepest structural needs and expectations of the human person. Let it be the work of our century.