Book Reviews

In Sustaining Affirmation, Stephen White weaves a strong and intriguing connection between the work of George Kateb, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and William Connolly. Each of these contemporary political philosophers offers a more or less felicitous account of what White calls weak ontology. White further argues that weak ontology represents a 'turn' in contemporary political philosophy that speaks to some of the deepest conundrums facing late modernity. In other words, in the best tradition of political theory, White uses textual interpretation as a staging ground for his own original contribution to political theory.

The heart of White's argument can be found, appropriately enough, in the title of the book: Sustaining Affirmation. The problem of affirmation is a problem endemic to late modernity. We are great navel gazers. We deconstruct, criticize, unmask. We are constantly aware and wary of pre-suppositions, hidden assumptions, horizons, and distortions. The very modern values we espouse are constantly under attack by our propensity to question and criticize. Our incessant critical self-reflection makes it difficult to affirm anything and very easy to deny everything. How can we affirm a positive ethical/political vision in such a climate? White, who is attracted to certain postmodern nuances, is keenly aware of the problem of affirmation faced by postmodern skepticism. But, and here I think is one of his most incisive moves, it is not only postmodernism that leaves affirmation on shaky ground. Other traditions, including what appears to be the most affirmative, liberalism, need sustaining. But sustaining against what? This is this question that leads to weak ontology and White's particular vision. Not only do we need a certain vision of the world (not just a vision of what the world is not) in order to sustain positive political and moral goals at an intellectual level, but we also need the aesthetic/affective resources offered by an ontology to sustain affirmation in the face of despair, tragedy, contingency, and arbitrariness. Although unlike postmodernism, modern liberalism is not caught in a viscous circle of denial and, in fact, affirms a great many things, it has weak resources to sustain affirmation in the face of more existential attacks. One of the themes of this book, and one I hope White pursues in more detail in the future, is a sense that modern liberalism is too thin to sustain its own moral ideal. White is attracted to thinkers who are not afraid to explore the murky world of being in a way and on a level quite alien to such thinkers as Rawls, Dworkin, or even Habermas.

What does this exploration uncover? Weak ontology (like strong ontology) 'claims to tell us something deep and essential about human being and world' (43-44). White insists that weakness should not be confused with thinness. Weak ontology offers a rich and full picture of the world. Its weakness lies in the fact that it is acknowledged to be contestable, historically embedded, and compatible with multiple visions of the way the world is. It is to be distinguished from strong or dogmatic ontologies (for example natural law) that offer true, universal, and unitary visions of the building blocks of being. Its 'status,' if you will, is weak, but its content is robust. But what is this content? And what could Kateb, Taylor, Butler, and Connolly possibly have in common as exemplars of this content?

For all four thinkers, the contemplation of human existence or being reveals or discloses certain 'facts' (White does not use this term, perhaps because it sounds too 'strong') about the world and our place within it that resonate deep within us. This resonance can serve as the aesthetic/affective foundation that sustains a moral/political commitment in situations when cognitive resources may fail or be too weak. For Kateb, certain ontological 'facts' come together in the Emersonian tradition to form a picture of the world and ourselves that inspires, on the one hand, wonder that there is earthly existence rather then none, and, on the other, respect for the unending pageant of particularity. Thus Kateb's liberal individualism is anchored in deep ontological sources that inspire an aesthetic appreciation for existence as such and the multiplicity of individuality. Although aware of the dangers of aestheticism, Kateb argues it is unavoidable. Here, I think White would agree. Without some hint of the sublime, something denied to us in mainstream liberalism, we may not be able to sustain our affirmation. Kateb sets the tone, but Kateb, in the end, is insufficiently attuned to the way the celebration of individuality has masked the oppression of difference.

Charles Taylor fully embraces the recognition of otherness along with an explicit commitment to the need to acknowledge ontological sources. Although for Taylor the contemplation of a transcendent God is the richest source of affirmation, there is a more general claim that we all need and, in fact, draw on ontological sources to form our identities and affirm our values. Here too, White would agree. Philosophical traditions that try to distance themselves from ontology distance themselves from an essential way in which we experience the world. Taylor argues that these 'sources' are often most powerful when we draw on them via an 'epiphany.' Epiphanic experience involves a revelation triggered by something outside the self. For Taylor, the aesthetic/affective dimension that is opened up through contemplation of what lies outside the subject is an important source of affirmation. Discovering and articulating our moral sources is an essential human activity and it is an activity that should be respected and protected through an integration of fundamental rights and a politics of recognition.

In arguing (quite convincingly, I might add) that Taylor's ontology is weak, White defends him against critics who say that here is just another form of outdated and perhaps dangerous theism out of step with modern pluralism. White's own criticisms of Taylor are very mild and amount to a puzzlement at Taylor's harsh and even alarmist attacks on postmodernism. Not only do such attacks fail to hit their mark, there are reasons Taylor might want to make common cause with certain strains in postmodernism - in particular those found in the work of Connolly. But before moving to Connolly, however, White takes up the work of Judith Butler.

White's reading of Judith Butler is the most tenuous of the four. She does not, as White acknowledges, embrace ontology in quite the same way as the other three and tries to leave her ontology 'thin,' perhaps in the fear that she will be accused of sneaking in a strong ontology. Although there is something about the world that, when it strikes us, often inspires us to take an ethical political stand, she never fully articulates the relationship between the ontological 'fact,' in this case the infinite potentiality of identity, and the affirmative ethical stand, a generosity towards difference that turns into 'new and future forms of legitimation.' It is all left too vague and suggestive by Butler for a satisfying version of weak ontology.

Connolly, like Taylor, is quite open about his appeal to ontology. He recognizes that there is something 'out there' beyond human subjectivity and control. The world is unruly and contingent, producing an inexhaustible and ever awe-inspiring variety of things. For Connolly, ontological contemplation reveals a world full of 'diverse energies and strange vitalities.' This, in turn, leads to a 'reverence' and 'protean care' for the world along side an ethos of generosity and forbearance. His affirmative vision of democracy finds its 'foundation' in the aesthetic/affective energy produced by seeing the world in a particular way, or rather acknowledging that the world is a certain way. We are motivated to cultivate an attitude of 'critical responsiveness' to the 'politics of becoming.' The politics of becoming is centered in the emergence of new identities and movements in the public sphere. Critical responsiveness, or what Connolly sometimes calls generous pluralism, celebrates and 'lets be' the emergence of new identities while at the same time resisting the temptation to essentialize those identities, i.e., is willing to criticize them.

While Connolly comes closest to articulating a felicitous weak ontology, White's criticism are quite telling: 'The ontological figuration of abundance is too radically underdetermined to prefigure by itself all the qualities Connolly wants to include in the ethical attitude of critical responsiveness' ( 129). White must be very careful here. In opposition to strong ontologies, weak ontologies do not claim any necessary connection between truths about the world and one unique moral stand. Ontologies 'prefigure' ethical/political doctrines. We must be able to see the connection, but that connection cannot claim a strong logical or causal status. White cannot quite see the relationship between Connolly's ontological sources and his political vision.

This, however, leaves room for White himself to step in and suggest a stronger determination of critical responsiveness. He suggests that Connolly needs to beef up his ontology with some notion of and eventual respect for the act of bringing meaning into the world. It is through this peculiar and magical human quality that White wishes to find an ontological source for human dignity. Indeed, the search for deep but non-foundationalist, transcendent but not transcendental, sublime but not theistic grounds to affirm human dignity is an abiding theme running through this book.

In the end, weak ontology has a strongly Heideggerian flavor. White wants to infuse modern moral insights with a less grasping attitude towards being. Existence is not just to be mastered. It can act on us in salutary ways if only we relax the modern drive to remake. 'One cultivates an attitude more receptive to the sheer 'event' of the presencing or 'worlding' of being: its continual becoming in a profuse, unmanageable manifold' (94). The world can be a rich source of secular revelation if we let it. The contemplation of what White refers to as 'natality,' or the infinitely surprising and unpredictable spectacle of new things coming into the world ('Becoming,' to be Heideggerian about it), undermines narcissism and hubris, two common dangers lurking in the confident rationalism of modernity.

Although I am, like many confident rationalists, highly suspicious of terms like 'presencing,' 'worlding,' and 'eventing,' White has touched a deep note that contemporary liberalism would do well to listen to. Acknowledging that there is a world out there not of our making and that a deep and essential fact about that world is the constant coming into being of things (also the passing away of things, but that is a topic for another day) can lead to a richer form of liberalism. Weak ontology can tap into an aesthetic/affective dimension that can sustain our moral political commitments to dignity and equality in the face of despair, without leading us into dogmatism the way traditional responses to despair have done. Furthermore, it can lead to a liberalism open to what is strange and new, to a liberalism that is open to its own cultivation into something strange and new.

Sustaining Affirmation contains a powerful vision of the world and a sustaining vision of what human beings can get from that world. It has been a long time since a book made me think and rethink so much. One could not ask for more.