Moral Imagination and Paideia

The claim that the United States is now in a “post-Constitutional age,” requires even less explanation than just a few months ago. https://t.co/aJg8HeU9Ux

— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) July 15, 2020

L&L review by Joshua Bowman of The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age

In this way, the book exemplifies a tradition of “moral realism” and resistance to abstract moral idealism. This realism requires, as one might expect, a sufficient attunement to reality in the broadest sense. That attunement takes place in the interplay between will, reason, and especially “imagination,” a word emphasized by nearly every author in the book.

“Imagination” as understood by Ryn and Babbitt, drawing on Burke, Benedetto Croce, S.T. Coleridge and others, is a pre-rational intuition of the good, the true, and the beautiful. “The imagination,” the editors explain, “always gives a unity, but it does not always give one that is real, which is to say, it is not always commensurate with the concrete, historical experience of human life.” Put simply, then, an imagination rooted in reality is what Ryn and Babbitt see as the Burkean “moral imagination,” while an imagination disconnected from reality is termed the “Romantic” or “idyllic” imagination of Rousseau.


By focusing on the imagination, the contributors emphasize the centrality of ethical character and culture which can be nourished or corrupted by experience and works of philosophy, history, theology, literature, art, and film.

The same as Kirk's use of the term "moral imagination"? It would seem so, as he, too, draws from Burke. It may be time to revisit this, the sharpening of synderesis through paideia, and what role art has to play in paideia. Imagination should be subject to right reason, not perverse appetite, I think we can agree with these traditional conservatives on that. But does the shaping of the "moral imagination" through the human letters, as offered by traditional conservatives, differ from the Renaissance humanists and contemporary intellectuals who are trying to resurrect them? There must already be something to a rightly-formed character in the youth for there to be a moral imagination which can receive something from the human letters. But paideia is not limited to humane studies alone, as Kirk admitted: "Of course it was not by books alone that the normative understanding of the framers of the Constitution, for instance, was formed. Their apprehension of norms was acquired also in family, church, and school, and in the business of ordinary life." The question is whether we have these other sources of moral formation now. I would say that many of them no longer exist or have been vitiated by both the presence of moral error and also by people who have fallen from the standards of Christian morality.

Also, let us not forget that the sort of paideia and handing on of tradition necessary to maintain American republicanism and to preserve the federal order given by the Constitution was already failing in the first half of the 19th cent, not the 20th, as is revealed by Lincoln's successful initiation and pursuit of the Late Unpleasantness. Second, the reviewer admits: "A country as large as the United States could hardly expect to achieve a kind of Aristotelian politeia" but "a genuine, widespread constitutional ethos is possible." It is probably an unreasonable fantasy that a "Constitutional imagination that informs morality" can be possibly restored at a national level. But we can work for the restoration of a good and healthy paideia, republicanism, and Aristotelian politeia at the local level.