Books, Volume 14 #3

David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995. 196 pp. $16.95.

Review by Jack Costello SJ

David Cayley's George Grant in Conversation is a tidy and completely readable compendium of all the major themes that occupied Grant in his publications on philosophy and politics from the fifties to the late eighties. The ideas are delivered here by the master himself in a series of retrospective conversations with the CBC's Cayley just a couple of years before Grant died.

Cayley has clearly immersed himself in George Grant's thought--and not only in his thought but also in the dynamic intertwining of Grant's family and public life with his philosophical thinking over the course of more than thirty years. The result is deeply compelling. More intellectually concentrated than William Christian's 1993 biography of Grant, it is also more dramatic than the biography could be, since here Grant himself churns over his own pilgrim's progress as university professor, philosopher, husband and father, Canadian, committed Christian believer, member of an old, Ontario Protestant family, and constant pursuer of truth. We are treated, as though in the flesh, to Grant's rhetorical passages through deep passion, apodictic arrogance and profound humility--sometimes all in the same discourse.

The major themes of Grant's interests made him, at once, a foundational thinker and an interpreter of current events. Deeply concerned with the political and social directions being taken in postwar Canada leading into the sixties and seventies, he also fiercely resisted the new, progressively functional purposes shaping Canadian universities during those years. At the root of his thinking lies his conviction that the liberal project of the Enlightenment, which has shaped life in western society for more than 200 years and is now dominating our whole planet, was a massive mistake--nothing less than a denial, through the glorification of instrumental reason and technology, of the true nature of the world and of human persons.

Grant turned to Plato, to the contemporary Platonist Leo Strauss and to the philosopher-mystic Simone Weil for aid in his own intellectual transformation away from this modern view of humanity based on the primacy of will, the mastery of nature, individualism and the shaping of society essentially by market-driven capitalism. He espoused in his teaching the Greek view that Being, truth, beauty and love lie at the heart of the world as something "given"--something to be recognized, revered and allowed by us, through our humility and care, to appear and shape us as human persons and societies. The "good," he asserts, is not the product of our individual choices but a rich ideal beyond human control. We acknowledge and respond to the good; we cannot fabricate it. We cannot redefine it with our fancy computers. Societies that recognized at least some sense of a "common good" as the ground of a civilized society--like Canada in its beginnings--show elements of this older and, as Grant held, truer view of human purposes.

At the root of Grant's thinking lies his conviction that the liberal project of the Enlightenment, which has shaped life in western society for more than 200 years and now dominates our whole planet, was a massive mistake.

In these pages we experience the power of Grant's acceptance of Martin Heidegger's critique of technology as the very form of our being in the twentieth century. We feel his delight and horror as Nietzsche puts his finger on the insanity and nihilism of this western, one-dimensional rationalism. We hear his reasons for "lament" over the passing of Canada as a distinctive nation in North America into the vortex of the imperial liberalism (and impending fascism) of the republic to the south. We squirm or smile (depending on our own convictions) as he exposes the thin philosophy underlying the pro-choice position in the abortion debate and snipes at the servitude to functionalism and secularism that have overtaken our universities. And we listen in awe--or with irritation--as he speaks of the mystical purity of the thought and life of Simone Weil, the mentor he calls a brilliant philosopher and a contemporary saint.

I sympathize with much of Grant's sensibility and espouse much of his analysis of modern society and of the Canadian reality. But in the end, despite his religious faith, he is a metaphysical pessimist. I want him to reappear among us--cigarette ashes, belly laugh and all--to explain why, after reading Heidegger and after accepting the great mystery of the Incarnation, he felt forced to fly back to Plato and the acceptance of an "other" domain as the place where "the good" abides.

I want to say, "George, yes--restore the place of beauty in our opening to truth, and the view of a knowledge grounded in love. But let it happen here, in this world. The good is here, in our struggle and hope, or it is nowhere. God is here and active, or nowhere."

We can't go back to Platonic or Cartesian dualism. Two worlds are too many. And we can't be satisfied with Weil's rarefied God of absence from the world. I can't understand how, loving his wife and children and the Nova Scotia shore as he did, Grant was able to accept this view of a God so detached from the world. We must go deeper in our thinking to modes of thought that allow us to affirm convincingly that beauty and love and order are the most natural things there are about this world--but deeper and more pervasive than mere technology or economics can ever touch or appreciate. And there--here--God is and can be found.

This kind of thinking, and feeling, is in fact taking shape in some thinkers now. Unfortunately, George Grant, that great soul in the large body, wasn't able to manage it. But it doesn't mean he failed. Do read this book. Despite his tendency to severe disjunction between the abstract and the concrete in his own efforts to overcome modern dualisms, Grant named our hungers and possibilities, as human beings and as Canadians, in a way few recent thinkers have been able to do. Praise him! And thank you, David Cayley.