There is, however, a metaphysical problem which needsWrst to be brieXy dealtwith, since it has serious implications for political behavior. A doctrine of creative
advance and social union, if not put in a larger context, is just too good to be true.
It surely does notWt the twentieth-century’s record of humanWnitude and fallibi-
lity, of limited minds and evil intentions. The perils of modernization, in short,
conWrm a current of skepticism which has washed against the foundations of
Western thought since ancient times. This tradition of pessimistic doubt has
both Greek and Biblical sources. Plato, needless to say, directed the Western
mind toward magniWcent vistas of aspiration. Yet it must be the rare student
who, onWrst opening Plato’s dialogues, has not felt the enormous force of the
doubts raised by Socrates. Despite the happy resolutions Socrates extracts from his
compliant respondents, the reader must wonder if the master has not done more to
make the case for appearance than for reality. To the student of politics, for
instance,The Statesmanis the classic celebration of the rule of law and constitu-
tionalism. Yet the reader can hardly be blamed if he doubts that the aYrmative case
can stand against the forceful exposition and clear-eyed perception of the inevit-
ability of personal rule in a world where ‘‘all isXux.’’ On a still grander scale, that
same Heraclitan hypothesis inspires probing inquiries into the relativity of know-
ledge and morality which severely shake the cosmic architecture in which the
dialogues seek to shelter human rationality. In modern times skepticism has
forceful advocates in Hobbes, Nietzsche, and the contemporary postmodernists
and deconstructionists. Not so many years ago, during a conversation with Isaiah
Berlin, while he was attacking the belief in a philosophy of history, which he
incorrectly attributed to me, he exclaimed, ‘‘Sometimes I agree with A. J. P. Taylor
that history is just one damned thing after another!’’
The encounter with the skeptical proposition that all isXux is not just a
contretemps of the intellectual life. Once its meaning for individual and human
eVort dawns, a paralyzing pessimism may set in. What is the use of trying to
control history, when consequences are so unpredictable? Why seek justice when
you know that any conceivable version will be controverted? Into this intellectual
and emotional void the totalitarian temptation may well enter with its promise of
power and faith, if only reason, the source of doubt and uncertainty, is surren-
dered. The brilliant negativism of the cultural life of pre-Hitler Germany is a
cautionary example.
Whitehead’s idea of the interconnectedness of things makes it possible to
conceive a cosmos in which theXux is overcome in a ‘‘saving order’’ which
creates and preserves the partial orders of the temporal world. In his severe bare-
bones intellectualism, F. H. Bradley summarized this conclusion: ‘‘We have no
knowledge of plural diversity, nor can we attach any sense to it, if we do not have
it somehow as one.’’ Emerson is more relaxed and closer to ordinary experience
when he says, ‘‘We grant that human life is mean, but how did weWnd out that it
is mean?... What is this universal sense of want and ignorance, but theWne
encounters with modernity 697