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Freedom and Authority
| Article
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10595 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
5,609 Words |
| Author
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Gerald McCool
Gerald McCool is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at
Fordham University in New York City. This paper was
originally presented at the International Conference on the
Unity of the Sciences. |
It is over thirty years since Max Horheimer and Theodore Adorno brought out their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Much more recently, the distinguished German theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg, published two important books, Theology and the Kingdom of God and The Idea of God and Human Freedom. All three books have made a significant contribution to our growing awareness of the crisis between freedom and authority in our liberal technocratic Western society. They have also called attention to the dangerous weakening of Western democracy through its failure to resolve this crisis. As the failure of individualistic Western democracy to solve the ethical and social problems of our age becomes increasingly apparent, Marxism's vigorous use of collective authority to achieve its social goals becomes increasingly attractive. To the idealistic youth of the Third World and of the technically developed West as well, Marxism is more than a brutally effective technique for getting things done. Marxism proposes a philosophy of nature, man and society whose human and social goals give a meaning to dedicated wok and personal sacrifice. It holds up personal and social ideals that the hedonistic individualism which characterizes much of our Western culture can no longer furnish. Marxism is even more attractive to idealistic young men and women who no longer derive the meaning of their life and work from religious faith but must find that meaning through natural reason in the finite, historical world of human experience.
Atomic individualism and Marxist collectivism confront each other today at the culmination of a long historical evolution. That evolution of ethical and social thought stretches from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment up to the present day. The tension between individual freedom and collective social authority has been a constant element in that long evolution. At different times different solutions have been proposed for it. For the purposes of this paper, however, we can divide the evolution of Western ethical and social thought into three significant historical stages. These are: (1) the dominance of the organic tradition in ethical and social thought in ancient Greece and the Middle Ages; (2) the dominance of the individualistic mechanist tradition from Descartes through the Enlightenment; (3) the reassertion of the organic tradition in our modern post-Enlightenment world. In the organic tradition, the interpretative model for the relation is the relation of a living whole to its organic members. The social whole owes its origin to nature. The whole is prior to the parts. The individual is related to the natural social whole as a subordinate organ with an inbuilt natural function to perform and, therefore, final causality provides the
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