An introduction to Roepke's third way
Much of Wilhelm Roepke’s work can be understood as an exposition of the
essence of Western, Occidental thought, a contribution to civilization that can
be summed up in the word “liberal” properly understood. It means balanced
respect for all the spheres of human personality and activity, multiplicities
that can only be fully pursued in the spirit of individual freedom within a
framework of individual moral restraint. And this also means an openness to
transcendence, to divine revelation, a fact which limits and conditions
thought and action in this world. Opposing this attitude is the largely Eastern
gnostic or immanentist thinking which is characterized in a closed,
self-contained system of thought, tending to absolutize one thing, be it art,
politics, science, or a technological or religious form, and render it
autonomous. This warfare between two trends of thought, the liberal and the
immanentist, is found throughout European history and is arguably the main key
to understanding this history.
Two prominent cases are the religious attitudes toward art and beauty,
and economy and wealth. In the following, the liberal ideal of balanced respect
for the varying allocations of the human spirit, as Weaver called it, is
highlighted by looking at some of the differences between Protestant and
Catholic views in the light of several authors including Richard Weaver,
Wilhelm Roepke, Thomas Mann, and Francis Shaeffer, and others. Comparing these
two spheres, beauty and wealth, should illuminate Roepke’s ideal of a humane
economy which is inseparably linked to his vision of the humane society. In
the end it should be clear that his vision is thoroughly European in the best
tradition, common and ancient.
The
Problem of Beauty
At the beginning of his chapter on art in his Visions of Order,
Richard Weaver quotes from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the story of an
artist’s moral decay. The quote reads:
And does not form have two aspects? Is it not moral and amoral at once – moral in that it is the result and expression of discipline, but amoral, and even immoral, in that by nature it contains an indifference to morality, is calculated, in fact, to make morality bend beneath its proud and unencumbered scepter? (Mann, 17)
The comment is particularly apropos to Mann’s story since his hero,
Gustav Aschenbach, is a successful but aging artist on the verge of the fatal
Dionysian abyss, the complete surrender to passion at the expense of reason and
morality, and in the end he succumbs to it. The story is full of penetrating
insights about the nature of beauty and art, and the lesson conforms to
Weaver’s own thesis: beauty is a form of power and like any power it can
corrupt, especially in a fallen world.
Weaver is concerned with a “false immanentization” (Visions of Order, 234), especially where aesthetic considerations displace
non-aesthetic ones. He gives several examples to illustrate his concern: the
ancient Byzantine world excessively honoured its religious and artistic forms;
the Mediaeval period likewise was preoccupied with certain institutional,
religious, and political arrangements, and also exhibited a tendency in its
theology to obscure content in the name of form. In this last case he refers to
Bonaventura’s Breviloquium, an exposition of Christian doctrine which, however,
reduced theology to pure form. “The dominant effect,” says Weaver, “is an
aesthetic one, such as proceeds from a complex but impeccable order” (236). And
this is a problem for all his examples: when vested with immanent power these
forms – aesthetic, or religious, or political – become “autotelic” and
“autarchic” (235-6). The “granting of moral status and imperative force” to
these forms is a grave danger since it blinds us to the “source of cultural
expression itself and may engender perverse cruelty” (241). These could be
static art forms, barbaric legal codes or a brilliant technology that demands
human sacrifice such as the automobile. The specific danger is that these forms
may become an “immanent power” and so constitute a form of “idolatry.” The
machine culture of today is the modern form of this idolatry. Weaver explains:
Men begin to fall in love with a formalization, which has the effect of providing a second, and unnatural vindication. What may be a fit subject for aesthetical contemplation, becomes, with slight if any awareness on the individual’s part, coercive in the moral sphere. But the sense of beauty or formal gratification cannot be indulged to an extent which deprives the individual or the group of those psychic fulfillments which come through the ethical and religious consciousness. (244)
That is the crux of the problem. The pursuit of beauty can become easily
unbalanced with respect to morals and religion. Here Weaver confronts the
religious dimension of this issue. It is not simply a matter of original sin in
which beauty corrupts, but a matter of important differences between Catholic
and Protestants. Protestants, like the ancient Jews, are acutely sensitive to
this side of the question: Because art and the pursuit of beauty tend to
dominate morality if not somehow contained, Protestants, like the ancient
Hebrews, try strenuously to avoid this corruption and sometimes in certain variations
of Protestantism in Weaver’s view, probably go too far. There is no virtue in a
cult of the ugly, either.
Nonetheless, Weaver insists the Hebrew-Protestant attitude is
essentially sound. This is consistent with early Christian rejection of the
formalizations of the pagan world in favor of the ethical life. Looking back on
this time, Weaver writes, “we see a large element of protest against the forms
of a brilliant culture. The New Testament was written in the common koine
Greek, not in the beautiful style of Greek literature and philosophy. The
Greeks could out-argue the Christians and the Romans could subject them to
their government, but there was in Christianity an ethical respect for the
person which triumphed over these formalizations…So we may regard the
asceticism and the turning away from beauteous form of early Christianity as
resistance to the kind of encroachment that is defined here” (241-242).
The danger that beauty may corrupt moral goodness, that, as Hebrew and
Protestant and early church theologians might put it, beauty is the doorway to
the devil, is reflected in Mann’s novel in philosophical terms. The hero,
Aschenbach, remembers his classical training: “Is it not written that the sun
diverts our attention from intellectual to sensual things? Reason and
understanding, it is said, become so numbed and enchanted that the soul forgets
everything out of delight with its immediate circumstances, and in astonishment
becomes attached to the most beautiful object shined on by the sun;…” (58-59).
In Aschenbach’s case, the beauty of the boy Tadzio led to an unnatural
attachment and inner disintegration and ultimately physical death, death in the
city renowned for its emphasis on physical beauty rather than ethical conduct.
The process of moral decay also destroyed Aschenbach as an artist.
This effect is echoed in the Plotinian formula which says that beauty is
“recognized by the soul as something long familiar, arresting and beckoning.”
It is the “arresting” and “beckoning” quality of art that must be watched, that
is worrisome. The power to ravish and suspend moral capacity, is obviously
dangerous. And in times of moral decay this is taken to be increasingly
acceptable. As Marcel Proust writes in his description of the decay of French
society in his Remembrance of Things Past, “…the trend of the
downward [moral] slope brings desire so rapidly to the point of enjoyment that
beauty by itself appears to imply consent.” As with Mann’s Aschenbach, Proust’s
story at this point is one of unnatural attachment excited by great physical
beauty. But it is a function of morals to separate desire and gratification, to
limit certain enjoyments to sanctioned forms, and when this barrier is lost
immediate gratification seems self-evidently right. For this reason those who
would interpret Dostoyevsky’s famous phrase, “beauty will save the world,” to
refer mainly or exclusively to the aesthetic are quite obviously wrong.
This tension between “reason and understanding” and sensibility and
emotion, with its temptation to become unbalanced in one direction or another,
is taken up as the familiar “nature vs. grace” problem by Francis Schaeffer.
Schaeffer, like Roepke, relies heavily on the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt
in seeing the difference between the Reformation and the Renaissance as a
difference also in geography between the north and the south. He writes:
“[Burkhardt] indicated that freedom was introduced both in the north by the
Reformation and in the south by the Renaissance. But in the south it went to license;
in the north it did not. The reason was that in Renaissance humanism man had
no way to bring forth a meaning to the particulars of life and no place from
which to get absolutes in morals. But in the north, the people of the
Reformation, standing under the teaching of Scripture, had freedom and yet at
the same time compelling absolute values” (100). His view conforms to Weaver’s
in that he sees the Reformers, and the countries accepting their influence,
like the first century Christians, were responding to an excess of artistic
sensibilities arising in part from the Renaissance revival of Greek cultural
ideas. They insisted on “compelling absolute values,” on “ethical respect for
the person,” rather than on the beauties of certain brilliant “formalizations.”
To illustrate one source of imbalance, Schaeffer might have referred to
the classic piece of High Renaissance literature, Baldisarre
Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Here the character Peter
Bembo argues that beauty and goodness have a certain felicitous relationship:
“And therefore, as there can be no circle without a centre, no more can beauty
be without goodness. Whereupon doth very seldom an ill soul dwell in a
beautiful body. And therefore is the outward beauty a true sign of the inward
goodness, and in bodies this comeliness is imprinted, more and less, as it
were, for a mark of the soul, whereby she is outwardly known….The foul [ugly],
therefore, for the most part be also evil, and the beautiful good.” As to the
empirical objection that beautiful women very often have nasty personalities,
he replies: “Neither yet ought beautiful women to bear the blame of that
hatred, mortality, and destructiveness which the unbridled appetites of men
are the cause of…” Beauty “rather plucketh them from it [the unchaste], and
leadeth them into the way of virtuous conditions, through the affinity that
beauty hath with goodness…”
There are two aspects to this quote. One is the identification of beauty
and virtue with the feminine and the other is the relation between beauty and
virtue as such. It would take another paper to explore the first problem, as
one could go back to pagan sources or at least to Dante’s use of Beatrice in
the Paradiso, and forward to English writers like Owen Feltham or Richard
Crashaw.
It is the second aspect that will be pursued here. Is there, then, such
a harmonious relation between beauty and virtue? A better Christian view
recognizes that the conquest of the soul over the body lies in the moral
sweetness of its character. When this becomes dominant in the person, his ugliness
tends to become invisible, for one sees the goodness of his character only.
Thus it was that Christ himself was said to be “plain,” and had no beauty that
we should desire him (Isa. 53:3). The basis for this is perhaps most forcefully
shown in the Old Testament where Satan, like the city of Tyre, was corrupted by
his beauty: “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty…” (Ez. 28: 17). If
pride goeth before a fall, beauty goeth before pride. Despite the
attractiveness of the posited harmony between outward beauty and virtue, the
Renaissance relationship is actually backward: it is not that beauty transforms
the soul and makes it good, leading from chastity to chastity, but that moral
goodness so transforms our perceptions that physical beauty or the lack of it
becomes irrelevant and invisible; the ugly no longer matters, is no longer
seen. How else do we explain Mary Magdalene kissing the feet of Christ who had
no beauty that we should desire him? Moral goodness transcended physical
beauty and rendered it innocuous, indifferent. It may well be that proximity
to great beauty, as Weaver says of wealth, is deflective of moral purpose.
But in the Catholic Counter-Reformation – and those countries under its
influence – the pendulum swung in the opposite direction with an
intensification of what Reformers found objectionable and paralleled the
problem of goodness and beauty with that of liberty and order. Nicholas Joost
observes the essence of the baroque period and Catholic Counter-Reformation was
to make appearances seem to transform reality and so extend the power of the
Church or the State. James King defines the baroque as an effort to introduce
order into disorder. Either way the result seems to have been that the greatest
license and the greatest control were simultaneously present. Thomas Hobbes,
writing from Paris, could advocate unlimited power of the state; the palace of
Versailles was built to show the infinite power of the absolute monarch, the
“disciplined might of her king” (King, 174), while Descartes argued for the
[allegedly] unlimited power of mathematics and science over the material universe
to bring order to chaos. One could add that the Cartesian reversal of the
Mediaeval dictum that knowing follows being is paralleled in art with the
similar reversal of the affirmation that beauty follows truth in the order of
goods. So, then, the effect of what may be called the baroque dictum “I think,
therefore I am” is to produce the autonomous self-sufficient artistic
imagination whose goal is to transform the world, impose order on the chaos of
imagination and life. This was the period in Spain when the statues of saints
were adorned with wigs and eyelashes to evoke holy elation and which Jacob
Burckhardt described as the “hispanicized century” (the 1600s). Roepke called
it “that stilted period of the baroque” lacking humor and dominated by physics
and mathematics while Schaeffer criticizes much baroque painting for “slipping
into the world of illusion” (98) in contrast to more realistic artists like
Rembrandt.
But Joost explains all this “hispanicizing,” this aesthetic
emotionalism, was the militant church’s effort to persuade the doubter and
convert the heathen. The Counter-Reformation’s method was mainly rhetorical
and hortatory, not logical and abstract. Its appeal was more aesthetic than
ethical in contrast to Weaver’s description of first century Christian
rhetoric.
Interestingly, this emotional and aesthetic rhetorical approach and the
geographic distinctions mentioned above between northern and southern Europe
are supported by Catholic scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. He agrees that,
broadly speaking, Catholic countries show a higher rate of crime and sin. But
he does not draw any obvious conclusion from this; instead, he delights in the
fact, claiming Catholic nations lead a “more colorful life in an ambiance of
beauty, savagery, and ‘primitiveness’…” Its practitioners apparently
understand that “[r]eligion is not primarily ethical action” but “before
anything else” is a matter of “faith, charity and liturgy.” He also revels in
the character of these crimes and sins for they are “always of a strictly
personal nature.” (One cannot help but ponder the present Balkan crisis whose
peoples have intense personal animosities based on memories reaching back for
generations; or, one may think of the character in Leon Uris’ story of Ireland,
Trinity, who said: “We’re Irish, messed up, superstitious and unorganizable…but,
by God, you don’t see any poets coming out of Ulster.”)
Perhaps more agreeable to both Protestants and Catholics is the
contrasting thought of Catholic writer, Henryk Sienkiewicz, in his famous Quo
Vadis? Nero is the Dionysian who sacrifices ethics to art, burning Rome to
become artistically inspired. And his other crimes, too, were intensely
personal, killing his mother, his wife, his son, and others. In the story the philosopher
Seneca says of the character Petronius, the arbiter elegantiarum, and vigilant
enemy of Nero, that he “has long since lost that faculty which distinguishes
good from evil” but would be ashamed if his action were “ugly.” Petronius
delights in the exhilaration of life’s “uncertainty”: “There is in that a
certain delight and the destruction of the present” while “Christian virtues”
would bore him. Of course, he is already bored because of his aestheticism; a
love of beauty devoid of ethical content and reduced to mere sensuality
produces ennui that invites death, and indeed, in the end Petronius kills
himself. When he says that “[w]hoso loves beauty is unable for that very reason
to love deformity” he hits very near Weaver’s concern of the aesthetic
encroaching upon the ethical; neither his love of beauty nor his own physical
beauty leads Petronius to higher virtues. He could not love his fellow man who
was physically ugly, no matter how spiritually or morally beautiful he was. And
when he says that “[l]ife exists for itself alone” and “I have lived as I have
wished, and I will die as pleases me” we have that essential paganism which is
the false immanentization of art and life, life without the transcendent.
Love of beauty alone is entropic, a turning inward unto death. In a way Nero
and Petronius were the same: both elevated the aesthetic over the ethical in
life.
Roepke agrees with Sienkiewicz. The “universal and undifferentiating
emotionalization and exaltation,” he says, “will lead from the sublime to the
ridiculous, to inner emptiness and dishonesty, to desecration, debasement and a
blurring of our scales of value” (Social Crisis, 77). Modern man, he laments,
produces works of art that “are so far above the heads of the people.” He goes
on: “It appears to me that we have here a complete parallel with the positivism
and relativist development of modern science, i.e., the abandonment of human
values. ‘Science pour la science,’ corresponds to `art pour l’art’” (Social
Crisis, 78). Here paganism assumes the forms of science and technology as well
as of art, the sacrifice of lives and values due to the believed “immanent
worth” (Weaver) of a beautiful formalization. “Just as Nero was suspected,”
says Roepke, “perhaps with some justification, of burning Rome in order to
erect his showy edifices, the 19th century, too, is almost unsurpassed in its
destruction of the venerable architectural monuments of the past and of the
age-old civilization of the open country…” (78). Roepke’s preference is for
the classical balanced and restrained art and architecture, the kind that
guides emotion and allows it to turn loose only in appropriate forms, which
thereby at once limit and elevate emotion. The same criteria apply to music
where Roepke favours Bach and Mozart to Wagner’s operas which formed part of
the cult of the colossal.
Thomas Mann comes to the same conclusion. Erich Heller commenting on
Mann’s view here says: “When Mann tried to imagine what the masterpiece of the
twentieth century would look like, he imagined something essentially different
from Wagner’s works…Such a masterpiece would be, he hoped, distinguished by its
logic, form, and clarity; would be austere and yet serene; more detached,
nobler and healthier than Wagner’s operas: `something that seeks greatness not
in the colossal and the baroque, and beauty not in the ecstatic’” (Heller,
111). And in his Luebeck speech Mann implies as much again when he says: “In
the course of writing I found out what I myself was, and what I wanted and did not
want – namely, not southern aesthetic posturing, but the cooler North, ethics,
music, humor” (Mann, xi; cf. xvii-xviii).
All of this leads to the very simple but easily obscured result that
morality is not the same thing as aesthetic appreciation. Beauty always has an
existential advantage, that is, because it operates on the emotions through the
senses, especially music and the visual arts, the power of its physical
presence is greater than the attraction of moral goodness which has no such
physical presence but must be apprehended by a motion of the mind, a movement
toward the transcendent that requires greater effort and so puts it at a
disadvantage. The former tends to self-indulgence, the latter to self-denial.
The one is more concrete, spontaneous and immediate, the other is more
abstract, labored, distant and elusive. The former blurs (non-aesthetic)
distinctions, the latter emphasizes them. It is tempting, then, following an
aesthetic impulse, to resolve the disharmony by making morality more pleasant
and by identifying it with beauty (or wealth). This is the fancy way of saying
the form of the corruption is to eat one’s cake and have it, too. The baroque
transformation that actually occurs is that beauty weakens morals as it
transforms it into something sensual, easy and immanent. It is precisely this
abstract nature of the one and the physical power of the other that allows one
to pretend that all emotionalism and impulses are good, more readily than that
the ugly, or unpleasant, is beautiful. In brief, Weaver, Mann, Schaeffer and
Roepke agree with Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “…for the power of beauty will sooner
transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can
translate beauty into his likeness” (Act III, sc. I).
The
Problem of Wealth
But just as the discipline of the artist can be both moral and immoral,
so also the free market can be a two-edged sword. Where the moral preconditions
are properly met, the free market proves to be good. Roepke cites the mainly
northern European countries as more often approximating the ideal economy he
has in mind: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the USA, the British
dominions and the Nordic countries (Moral Foundations, 92). Germany
itself is more complicated though here he usually refers favourably to the
North and Northeast and especially to the Hanseatic cities. Referring to those
countries with a predominantly Latin or Roman legal tradition
(Southern/Mediterranean?) he says these are often identified “with absolutism,
despotism, bureaucracy and abstract rationalism.” Though this view is far from
satisfying, it “contains a grain of truth” (Moral Foundations, 107).
But when the moral and social prerequisites are not met, which limit and
circumscribe market action, its destructive possibilities become dominant. In
its modern capitalistic form the market is a procedure that preserves a certain
order while being destructive of traditional values and structures. It is the
old problem of liberty running to license. These tendencies come in two forms.
The first is what Roepke calls “the cult of the colossal” or, especially when
he refers to the 19th century, the “neo-baroque century of the colossal” in
which bigness and quantity possess immanent worth. This description bears
comparison with Joost’s view relating the baroque vision to the “emerging
bourgeois capitalism with its hope of an endlessly expanding, indefinitely exploitable
economy,” which, along with the new science, “stood for dynamism, change, [and]
movement” (Joost, 154). This can be interpreted as the Hobbesian moment in
economics in so far as Hobbes’ thought influenced subsequent economic thinkers
such as William Petty and Josiah Child with their emphasis on national and
economic expansion, or what Burckhardt called the “cult of political unity and
national expansion.” It can also be understood as a Cartesian
matter-in-motion applied to economic thought, where people are seen as social
molecules driven by material appetites, the kind of vision Thorstein Veblen
delighted in attacking.
The second destructive tendency is the convenient and comforting
temptation to see wealth as a sign of moral goodness, or even to take its mere
existence to mean moral goodness. When we come to the Gilded Age in America,
we find a secularized Calvinistic (can we say “hispanicized”?) view of
wealth: Russell Conwell, speaking in Andrew Carnegie’s time, claimed that:
“Godliness is in league with riches.” Not to be outdone, Episcopalian bishop
William Lawrence believed: “In the long run it is only to the man of morality
that wealth comes” (Fusfeld, 76). Then there is the simpler, more forceful view
of John D. Rockefeller who said flatly: “God Almighty gave me my money”
(Levitt, 173). Markets and products by their very existence, their physical
presence, have an allure that morality does not have. Wealth itself has an
attractiveness by the same reason, a cogency that confuses thought, that
implies if a man is rich he must also be good or wise or knowledgeable or
possess some great virtue, as in the song from Fiddler on the Roof, “If I Were
a Rich Man”: “And it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or
wrong: when you’re rich they think you really know.” Or as the Psalmist says
“men will praise you when you do well for yourself” (Ps. 49:18). This can be
contrasted with Prince Agur’s liberal dictum: “Give me neither poverty nor
riches” (Prov. 30:8).
As the pursuit of outward, physical beauty is thought naturally or
normally to harmonize with the inward virtue in art (and philosophy), so also
in economics, self-interest is thought to harmonize with the common good. In
Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, for example, the vice of pure
selfishness is transformed into the virtue of public benefits in what amounts
to an economic version of the elusive alchemical quest of transmuting base
metal into gold. In both cases the desired harmonies are more or less automatically
achieved as a function of the assumed internal relations. The result in both
instances is to paralyze the moral will. If physical beauty inevitably is
linked to and leads to spiritual virtue, then one can relax and focus just on
the outward form, and the rest will follow; and if the pursuit of personal gain
necessarily results in the common good, one need only focus on self-interest.
The moral optimism, the neglect of man’s fallen nature, that underlies these
views should be self-evident. A tendency to libertinism is common to both, the
familiar bohemian in the one case and laissez-faireist in the other. Examples
of its effect come easily to mind: the decay of chivalry to a form of
woman-worship with its corresponding practice of adultery, and in the weakening
of the capitalistic economy to the point where unlimited desire reigns while
society, community, and family collapse.
The
Place of Art
For Dostoyevsky beauty will save the world. On the other hand, Boris
Pasternak has one of his characters in Doctor Zhivago give the
opposing Tolstoyan view “that the more a man devotes himself to beauty the
further he moves away from goodness.” Is there a way of reconciling these two
points of view, or in the manner of Roepke, can we ask if there is a “third
way”?
As with wealth, the answer is simple: art has a proper place in life but
it is not all over the place; it must be limited and balanced against other
values. So, in commenting on Aristotle’s Poetics, Weaver also writes that
Aristotle recognized “art has a function of its own, that it is to be judged by
its effectiveness in providing certain kinds of pleasure and not by how well it
subserves the state or the individual in their pursuit of the morally good
life” (243). Like other disciplines, but in its own way, art helps us “to
penetrate the structure of reality and potentiality” (243). Weaver then finally
arrives at a “third way” conclusion:
Somewhere between total prohibition (or as total as could be effected)
of the allurements of form because of the preoccupation and sacrifice they
entail and complete abandonment to them out of a feeling of their immanent
worth which allows us to ignore their ethical consequences, a ground will have
to be discovered. (243)
Just as the economist works on certain economic issues by excluding at
least temporarily from his analysis certain non-economic demands, so also the
artist often works to exclude non-aesthetic demands from our responses, says
Weaver, because these would interfere with his artistic constructions and
purposes (243). However, he adds: “If art is to be granted its proper autonomy,
it must show good faith by giving up its claim to authority where a different
kind of activity is required of men” (243-244). It must not “try to be
regulative in the practical realm” (243). In Modern Painters,
famous 19th century art critic John Ruskin summarizes the answer correctly.
While affirming truth (including moral goodness) and beauty are both
indispensable to the artist, he insists “…they are to be sought together in the
order of their worthiness; that is to say, truth first, and beauty
afterwards.” And Thomas Mann would seem to concur in favoring Goethe’s “ideal
balance” between the sensual and the moral.
The liberal balance, though, is not an equality. It begins, as Ruskin
indicates, with the ethical and then moves toward the beautiful, and this is
more than simply a balance; it is essentially the bourgeois spirit at its best.
As Mann states in his 1926 Luebeck speech: “For the ethical bent, in contrast
to the purely aesthetic impulse, to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure as well
as to nihilism and the vagabond’s flirtation with death – the ethical bent is
really the bourgeois spirit applied to life” (xvi). This spirit of
“buegerlichkeit,” Mann writes, is one of restraint and control and “means the
refusal to be carried away” (xxiii). Pasternak draws a similar conclusion when
he links art with social and economic classes. “Only the familiar transformed
by genius is truly great. The best object lesson in this is Pushkin. His works
are one great hymn to honest labor, duty, everyday life! Today, ‘bourgeois’ and
‘petty bourgeois’ have become terms of abuse, but Pushkin forestalled the implied
criticism in his ‘Family Tree,’ where he says proudly that he belongs to the
middle class….” To forestall the connotation of abuse, Roepke preferred to call
this the “buergerliche” spirit which is as much opposed to the barrenness of a
false puritanical prudery and as it is to the emotional bombast of the baroque
which does seek to be “carried away” whether in the ecstasies of art, science,
politics, or technology.
Summary
The “third way” is used by Weaver in art and Roepke in economics as well
as by a number of other authors. It is really an expression of the Western
contribution to civilization, the “liberal” ideal which claims that because of
a higher reality transcending man and his activities, no sphere of endeavor is
completely self-sufficient; no sphere possesses an immanent worth that would
justify it to act independently of or encroach upon the legitimate demands of
the other allocations of the human spirit; “autarchy” (Roepke) or “false immanentization”
(Weaver) is rejected. In the one case, in Roepke’s language, “[e]conomically
ignorant moralism” is to be rejected as much as “morally callous economism” (Humane
Economy, 104). In art, aesthetically ignorant moralism and morally ignorant
aestheticism have no place.
But this is a difficult road to follow. It requires constant balancing
of these activities and resistance to the natural inclination to love
excessively a particular sphere of action and its corresponding forms – and so
to begin lording it over other endeavors. Much of the history of the West can
be understood as an effort to achieve this balance even when it has failed to
do so. It is one thing to have an ideal which is not fully realized and another
not to have the ideal at all. In the case of art, the failure has been either a
too casual belief in the harmony of beauty and goodness or a too stern awareness
of their disunity and antagonism. A similar history can be told about
attitudes toward wealth. In both cases the answer is not to reject altogether
or allow total freedom, neither collective control by the state (even if it
means, as in Plato’s case, total banishment) nor complete laissez-faire. The
essentially Western, Occidental, “liberal” answer is the classic one of liberty
within limits. The “semi-autonomy” of Weaver for art and the “moral
prerequites” of Roepke for the economy derive from this same source.
Books by Wilhelm Roepke, and others mentioned in this essay, may be
found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Essays by/about Wilhelm Roepke may be found here.
Ralph Ancil is the President and Economist
for the Roepke Institute and is a professor at Geneva College.
[This essay appeared in The Legacy of Wilhelm Roepke: Essays in
Political Economy by Ralph Ancil. Copyright held by the Wilhelm Roepke
Institute and reprinted by permission. Read the series introductory essay here. Copyright held by the Wilhelm Roepke Institute and reprinted by
permission.]
References:
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Foresman/Little Brown, Glenview, Illinois; 1990.
Nicholas Joost; “Dryden’s Medal and the Baroque in Politics and Art,” in
Modern Age (Spring, 1959, vol. 3, #2)
James King; “The Baroque Spirit and the Decline of France” in Modern Age
(Spring 1959, vol. 3, #2).
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn; “Revolution, Crime, and Sin” in Modern Age
(Spring 1958, vol. 2, #2).
Erich Heller: “Autobiography and Literature,” in Death in Venice, Modern
Library, New York; 1970.
Theodore Levitt; “Business and the Plural Society,” in Modern Age
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Thomas Mann; Death in Venice, Modern Library, New York; 1970.
Thomas Mann; “Luebeck as a Way of Life and Thought,” in Bubbenbrooks,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Wilhelm Roepke; A Humane Economy, Henry Regnery Company,
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Wilhelm Roepke; Moral Foundations of Civil Society,
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Wilhelm Roepke; The Social Crisis of Our Time, Transaction
Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1992.
Francis Schaeffer; How Should We Then Live?, Fleming H.
Revell Company, Old Tappan, New Jersey, 1976.
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