John Rawls: Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Elizabeth H. Wolgast: “The Demands of Public Reason.” Columbia Law Review. Volume 94, Number 6 (October 1994), 1936-1949.

 

John Rawls distinguishes public discourse—in which the only legitimate appeals are to be consonant with the overlapping consensus of what’s held to be reasonable—from private discourse—discussion among family members, friends, and other groups that do not represent the public at large. Private discourse may rightly include appeals to ultimate ends and comprehensive doctrines not shared by the general public. Public-discourse appeals, by contrast, must be stated in rational terms, terms by nature open to public inspection in the sense that they presuppose no special revelation or exclusive knowledge. Democratic discourse must be rigorously exoteric.

In her lucid critique, Elizabeth H. Wolgast raises a concern that Rawls also sees. Does democratic public discourse as Rawls defines it not yield a sort of forced Averroism? The “demands of public reason” seem to require an unnatural or even hypocritical separation of “the values leading to one’s position from the public argument given for them. How, one asks, can a person’s responsibilities as a citizen require this?” (1939)

It’s clear, I take it, that it is often prudent to argue in the manner Rawls commends. If I am a Hindu and you are an evangelical Christian, I cannot persuade you to ban meat eating by appealing to the doctrine of reincarnation. I will need to say something consistent with your principles as well as mine. Vegetarianism will solve many public health problems (I might argue); it will end much cruel treatment of animals; it will help to save the ozone layer from dangerous bovine omissions. Et cetera. Wolgast concedes this point: “Rawls’s proposal does reflect the real world of public debate,” in which “a wise citizen often will refrain from invoking parochial religious and moral values… in order to maintain communication with and even persuade someone who holds different views” (1948). But neither Rawls nor Wolgast can rest content with prudence. Rawls wants a ‘freestanding’ political argument that has the same legal features as Kantian morality and politics (without the need publicly to invoke Kantian morality and politics). Wolgast seems morally and politically dissatisfied with Rawlsian liberalism, claiming that without moral integrity the public sphere will break down, undermining the stability of the overlapping consensus of rational public discourse. Toleration of opposing views is at most a feature of democratic praxis, but it can have no rational foundation in a theoretical sense.

I shall focus on Wolgast’s concerns about “personal integrity in debate” (1941). She asserts that “the representative who recasts his objections to conform to public reason… argues with less than maximum force” (1943). That is, the integrity of the argument is compromised inasmuch as the speaker cannot fully integrate all of his objections into one coherent statement. She also asserts that such a representative “speaks disingenuously”; his personal integrity is also compromised (1943). I shall argue that Rawls’s argument can be defended from this two-pronged criticism on principled as well as on the above-mentioned prudential grounds, without conceding that prudence itself stands as a central moral virtue in politics.

Wolgast gives the example of a Congressman who is a Christian Scientist. Under the Rawlsian regime he is stymied from objecting to a public inoculation program on religious grounds. He must argue not that inoculation is against the law of God but that inoculation violates his First Amendment right of free exercise of religion. “Framed in this cooler, more legalistic way, some of [the argument’s] power has been lost” (1943).

Not necessarily. Some of the passion has been lost but, given the fact that few people share that passion, the only persuasive power that seems lost is the inability to rally believers. Even this power has not been lost; the Congressman can rally his co-religionists in communications to them, without violating the rules of public discourse. Further, Wolgast does not show that there exists any principled civic obligation to encourage a citizen to maximize the rhetorical effectiveness of his argument. To rule out publicly unreasonable arguments does not necessarily “vitiate just the kind of open and rational atmosphere that Rawls, among others, identifies with liberal society” (1942). To the contrary, it may make such a society practicable by cooling passions and forcing each citizen to think about others outside his own group.

Wolgast also claims that “the religious argument [against inoculation] raises the First Amendment issue in its full power and necessity, refreshing one’s sense of its importance, while the other does not” (1943). Again, not necessarily. The Congressman can paint an attractive and affecting picture of life according to the precepts of Christian Science in terms consistent with the overlapping consensus. He can appeal to citizens’ sympathy for the underdog, saying, ‘Do not compel us to compromise our religion, for your religion might be the next one on the chopping block.’ The “full power and necessity” of the First Amendment lies there, else it never would have made it into the Constitution in the first place. To defend free religious exercise one need not absolutize it. Religious absolutists may drift away from modern republicanism, toward theocracy.

With respect to the integrity of the Congressman himself, Wolgast argues that a Christian Scientist who makes appeals not based on Christian-Science doctrines speaks “disingenuously” (1943). “[I]t is dishonest to misrepresent our reasons for a view” (1944); dishonesty undermines public discourse itself by concealing true intentions, harboring secret doctrines.

It would indeed be dishonest to misrepresent one’s reasons for a view. But there is no reason why a Rawlsian citizen would need to do so. An openly Christian-Science Congressman would not be misrepresenting his views at all if he argued against inoculation on public health grounds, if he sincerely believed that inoculations are medically unnecessary or harmful. Nor would he misrepresent his view if he hung his argumentative hat on the First Amendment. He could simply say: ‘I personally am opposed to inoculation first of all on religious grounds, but I recognize that most of my fellow citizens do not stand with me on those grounds. I hold that they should oppose inoculation on public-health and Constitutional grounds.’ It is precisely an instance of integrity to admit personal reasons for advocating a given policy and then to argue in terms that others can accept as well, if you also believe in those terms.

“Who,” Wolgast asks, “being persuaded to a position by his moral and religious values, would not believe that these values have the greatest persuasive power and thus greater power for change?” (1944) No one, I reply, except two types of people: those who assume that the “values” that resonate most powerfully with themselves necessarily resonate most powerfully with everyone else; and those who are convinced that such values, once stated and defended, can and will persuade most people. The first type of person makes an unreasonable assumption that will quickly yield to real-world experiential refutation, if only in the form of ending the Congressman’s career. The second type of person will not be precluded from making ‘conversion’ arguments under the Rawlsian regime, so long as he does not make them in public policy debates. In a Rawlsian republic, the Reverend Billy Graham could still bring his crusade to Madison Square Garden and a television near you. If he converted a workable majority of any political community to his views, many of these would then become part of the overlapping consensus. Rawls makes this point in Chapter 6, where he cites Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, with its invocation of Biblical themes. “Lincoln does not violate public reason as I have discussed and as it applied in his day—whether in ours is another matter—since what he says has no implications bearing on constitutional essentials or basic justice” (254). This implies that the overlapping consensus, the sphere of public reason, is open to change as demographics and private convictions shift. What was reasonable in 1865 is not necessarily reasonable in 1997. Increasing secularization—or the reverse—can occur in civil society before it is expressed in public discourse. The overlapping consensus isn’t an unchanging quasi-Platonic essence but a matter of circumstance, given the existence of the intermediate, third ‘sphere,’ civil society.

What about Wolgast’s hard case, that of the challenging the modern republican regime itself? The regime could not, on Rawlsian grounds, be challenged immediately in public discourse. But it could surely be challenged in private and civil-society discourse. If fundamentalist Islam swept through American civil society—as it could do, given the First Amendment—and in the year 2065 there came to be the same percentage of Muslims as there were Christians in 1865, why could some new Lincoln not appeal to Islamic themes in public discourse? More radically, if the citizens were by then convinced that republicanism is an unreasonable regime, given these new terms of public discourse, why could they not introduce new modes and orders, ending republicanism altogether? This would run afoul of Rawls’s neo-Kantianism, but that is a moral not a political theory. Rawlsian liberalism is thus indirectly open to change, even to its own replacement by consensual means.

Jacques Derrida: “History of the Lie.” In Without Alibi. Peggy Kamuf translation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Hannah Arendt: “Lying in Politics.” In Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972.

 

Derrida wants to defend ‘deconstructionism’ from Plato, lurking in the guise of Hannah Arendt. But, for political purposes, he also wants to be able to say, ‘J’Accuse!’ from time to time. This is a dilemma.

The sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity did not find this to be (how-you-say?) problematic until Socrates came along and spoiled the party. Now that Socrates has come along, his spirit lingering despite his execution, he pesters word-manipulators and world-manipulators like, well, a gadfly. Not Athenian poison, not Machiavellian stilettos, not the heavy artillery of Hegel or Nietzschean firebombs can quite transport the old boy’s shade to the Blessed Isles.

Derrida wants to historicize, first, the concept of lying—contrast it with non-Western traditions—and, second lying itself—its genesis and peregrinations within the Western tradition. Together, these historicizations will amount to “a true history” of the lie, for which his essay will serve as prolegomena. This may of course turn out to be an unfinished work.

He discusses Arendt, who discusses a new kind of lie, “the absolute lie,” the lie used deliberately to erase and replace what everyone knows to be true. ‘Image’ no longer refers to ‘Original’ but destroys and replaces it like a Social-Darwinian survivalist. Derrida worries that the Absolute Lie might merely shadow Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, and be equally vulnerable to Nietzschean ripostes.

On the other side, Arendt also discusses the Kantian absolute—not cognitive but moral—never to lie. The truth is “the trace of fugitive gods,” original and sacred. A lie is always harmful, polluting the spring of right, ruining the social bond. Lying is not universalizable (if you want society—a point Kant elides, in his attempt to dump teleology). Derrida, with Arendt, prefers not to be so severe.

Getting down to cases, Derrida looks at France’s then-president Jacques Chirac’s public acknowledgment of French guilt for the deportation of Jews under the Vichy regime. Derrida rightly sees that Charles de Gaulle, in studiously ignoring this French crime, refused to recognize the Vichy regime as genuinely French. (To be sure, it was headed by no less a French hero than Marshall Pétain, de Gaulle’s former mentor, but it was forced upon France by the Nazi conquerors.) In light of this, who is lying? De Gaulle or Chirac? Derrida makes a Socratic move by means of a French proverb: “It is not good to tell every truth.” Truth-telling is not always good because the knowledge of the truth may in some circumstances dispirit citizens, make them incapable of getting on with their lives in a none-too-friendly world, a world that might use not ideas but truth itself as a weapon, injuriously. This means that truth-telling is not always good. It may also mean that the truth itself is not always good—that, contra Nietzsche, Socrates is neither a nihilist nor an optimist. Derrida wants an idea of the good, but as a historicist he knows no stable one, and as a deconstructionist he wants no such stable good to await us at ‘the end of History.’ Therefore, he is forced, reluctantly, to treat what he calls “performative truths—conventions settled by force—as truths simply, rather than as facts. With no real idea of nature, much less of natural right, for Derrida conventions become more formidable. By what can one call for their change? And was not the Vichy regime a “performative truth,” as long as the Nazis made it so?

(Before leaving this topic, Derrida makes the eminently Socratic (and also Hegelian) point that the city risks “perverting” the truth into “dogmatism or orthodoxy.” Now there is a legitimate target for deconstructionists: but only in the sense that the city is perverse and not necessarily in the sense that the city necessarily lies. Again, Derrida offers no transhistorical—and, therefore, no genuinely transconventional criterion with which to criticize conventions. Is he left with the triumph of the will, as is Nietzsche? Or must he wait for Godot, at some Heideggerian station?)

Derrida’s next move is to settle a score with his critic, Tony Judt. He may be said to be motivated by the Socratic quest for justice, although, unlike Socrates, he is demanding justice for himself, and, also unlike Socrates, he can point to no stable definition of justice. Judt had accused Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida himself of failing to protest against the longtime ‘ignoring’ of Vichy’s crimes by subsequent French authorities. Calumny! Derrida charges. He had signed a petition in 1992 calling upon then-president Mitterand to come clean. Judt stands convicted not of lying but of another kind of moral failure: lack of assiduousness in seeking the truth. This failure is related to self-deception, so-called, which rests on an unconscious aversion to the truth. Judt’s soul is insufficiently—or at least inadequately—erotic, Socrates would say.

Thus Derrida suggests, both that truth-telling is not always good, and that truth-telling about Derrida is. He holds journalists not to higher standards than politicians, but to more rigorously factual ones. How, then, can deconstructionism give a history of veracity and the lie without collapsing the distinction between them?

He begins (as Arendt did, years before) with a consideration of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’ Totalitarianism (as Dostoevsky foresaw) is utilitarianism or pragmatism absolutized. Totalitarians use ideas as weapons, call upon us not to understand the world but to change it. (Thus Derrida silently rejects the core of Marxism, while applauding, later on, Marx’s critique of ‘ideology.’) Derrida evidently sees that ‘deconstructive’ techniques might easily serve a ‘totalizing’ agenda, and that’s one ‘prolegomena’ he’d rather not see written. Similarly, Nietzsche sees that the bland demi-relativism or soft nihilism of late nineteenth-century Europe might easily be kayoed by some forthright nihilism, itself the prelude to some ‘totalizing’ superman. Derrida differs honorably from Nietzsche in not licking his chops at this prospect. “Ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, if they exist [!], consists in deciding on the strategic orientation to give in this problematic….” (emphasis added). It sure does. It even burdens ‘totalizing’ tyrants with the problem Arendt sees: You can’t utterly reconstruct the world without deceiving everybody, at lest initially. So how will you keep your story straight?

Insofar as he acknowledges the need for an orientation (strategic or otherwise), Derrida rediscovers a Platonic thought. The remedy for the Absolute Lie cannot be the Absolute Truth. Given the inevitable dogmatization of Absolute Truth in politics, a ‘totally’ transparent society would leave no place to hide. (Unless the philosophers were kings, in which case they could hide behind the purple, in the Nocturnal Council. This is a highly unlikely outcome.) Derrida very sensibly objects to Alexandre Koyré’s lumping-together of the Marranos with Spartan and Indian warriors, and with Jesuit warriors-of-the-Spirit. The transparent society, perhaps in contrast with the ‘open society,’ would make the self-defense of the heterodox impossible.

In order to vindicate the truth, one should not expand the political realm but delimit it. In this enterprise Derrida holds the solitary philosopher on the one hand and (following Arendt) such institutions as the judiciary and the universities on the other. Judging from his occasional hints, he knows very well that these institutions cannot be apolitical, and that even the solitary philosopher must understand politics well enough to know how to govern his solitude (and perhaps his dialogues, with philosophers living and dead).

For all his (somewhat surreptitious) Platonizing, Derrida wants to hold onto his anti-Platonic ontology. As a historicist, Derrida denies the stability of truth. To believe in the stability of truth is to be too optimistic, he writes, following Nietzsche. To believe in the stability of truth “makes of history, as history of the lie, the epidermic and epiphenomenal accident of a parousia of truth.” But (in truth) Plato never makes much of “history.” History, in the sense of a pattern of events rather than an account of events, does not exist in Plato. Plato makes myths, not histories. Further, if lies are as enduring as Derrida says (and maybe they are), might that not mean that they track the truth, like a shadow, and thus bespeak the stability of truth? Or, alternatively, might such perdurable lies not have some truth mixed in with them—and therefore not be lies at all, but myths or fables? Without examples, it is hard to judge.

Well, after all, it’s only a draft of a prolegomena to a history of the lie. I solemnly swear not to treat Derrida as Tony Judt does, or to behave like a captious book reviewer who complains that a 400-page book doesn’t tell ‘the whole truth.’ Surely ‘the whole truth’s’ very wholeness suggests limits? Truth may be ‘tyrannical’ in the sense that it dictates to us, telling us that such-and-such is so, like it or not. But it cannot be ‘totalitarian’—else there would be no need for the notion—of truth, of totalitarianism, or of any other notions, which after all require definition.