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conception of reason back to classical antiquity can be confronted and shown to be inadequate.
Hence a different understanding of reason than the modern—i.e., the Socratic dialectical
approach—remains open. But the critique of modern, constructivist reason is devastating. It
cannot be ignored. Without that modern notion of reason no linear conception of history can be
constructed. Without theoretical constructivism, actual history can hardly be assumed to be
predictable or inevitable. There was no inevitability that the Nazis or the Soviets would be
vanquished. That required clarity of purpose, sacrifice and resolute and determined action over
an extended period of time especially by a specific world historical democratic people and its
leaders.
An event-horizon understanding of the nature of history and human historicality need not
lead to historicism or the emasculation of serious action if linked to a Socratic dialectical point of
departure and an openness to the phenomenon of verticality built into human existence itself. I
have obviously been implying those “higher” vertical standards all along when I have invoked
such terms as high moral purpose and the civilizing necessity of avoiding a descent into barbaric
chaos. There is no counter argument for the person who does not see that civilization is a good,
or that a life devoted to a good beyond one’s own narrow self-interest is noble. In the end one
cannot teach a blind man colors, or the morally myopic the difference between the high and the
low. But even those committed theoretically to relativism proceed on a myriad of judgments of
the high and low in their daily lives. It is hard enough to consistently maintain relativist
premises theoretically; it is impossible to do so in one’s everyday life.
The difference between the high and the low is built into the fabric of humanity; it
cannot, and need not, be philosophically constructed. We will find it in the wishes and
aspirations of, for example, the American people or not at all. One wastes one’s time, not to
mention moral and intellectual energy, with those who are determined to assert that the obvious
does not exist. It is obvious that liberty is preferable to tyranny, that the openness of the mind is
preferable to closure and darkness, that a life devoted to high purpose is superior to one devoted
to trifling self-indulgence, that the Taliban’s treatment of women was inhumane, that the insanity
of Al Quaeda is not divinely inspired, that tyrants and democratically elected statesmen are two
different things, that resolute self-defense is not brutality, that weakness and allowing events to
drift are not moral virtues, that magnanimity is only possible from a stance of strength, and on
and on. These things are, for anyone who has not been theoretically talked out of them, self-
Convention