A Man of Vision
Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences Fifty Years Later
by Robert A. Preston
I first read Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver sometime in the late sixties. For me, being trained in scholastic philosophy, and always struggling to make the subject of metaphysics understandable and relevant to college students, it was an answer to prayers. For almost 30 years, Ideas has been a companion text to one of the traditional textbooks on Thomistic metaphysics in my course, and it has been a most happy marriage, at least for me, if not for my students. But I hope that I am not being unduly optimistic when I say that, for most of my students, Weaver became a guide to their understanding of what has gone wrong in a society they were now only beginning to examine. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss once again Ideas Have Consequences, this time from the perspective of 50 years after its publication, and to join with scholars who have a fuller knowledge of Weaver’s writings than I, to review the importance of this undeservedly little-known thinker for an understanding of the present age.
I believe that Weaver possesses a vision of an organized society and a unified culture from the perspective of one of the two golden ages of the Western tradition, that of the High Middle Ages from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries.1 From this perspective he provides a critique of the slow decline of society beginning in the fourteenth century, caused by what he calls “the fateful doctrine of nominalism,”2 to the present time, where that doctrine is now the dominant view.
Intelligibility & Freedom
Weaver’s vision is based upon two premises: the world is intelligible and the human person is free. The actual source of this intelligibility Weaver does not discuss because his strategy is to make his argument as nonreligious as possible, but it is clear that he finds that source of intelligibility in a supreme mind, whether that mind be called the architect of the universe or the creator.
In appealing to the intelligibility of the universe, Weaver is siding with the philosophical realists against the nominalists. The difference between the two schools is that the realists admit of two realities: the universal and the individual. An example of this is that each person is an individual existent who shares in the universal of human nature. In the traditional metaphysics of realism, we are at once one and many. We are all one in our human nature and many in our individuality.
The significance of this is easy to see. It is the universal that provides the basis of intelligibility. If we can find an essential characteristic of human nature, then we know that this characteristic is possessed by every individual human being.
Weaver will use such terms as universal, essence, nature, and form interchangeably. It is upon the reality denoted by these terms that truth is based because the universal transcends space and time. It has its reality based in an order beyond the spatial and temporal, that is, beyond the order of change and motion.
It is also the realm of the universal that is the basis of truth. Weaver accepts the traditional definition of metaphysical truth as that which cannot be otherwise than it is, and truth in this sense is unchanging and always and everywhere the same. If, for example, we determine lying to be the willful deception of someone in authority who has the right to know, and if we further determine that justice in society cannot be achieved if lying is tolerated, then we can see that whenever this principle is violated it is a moral violation. And this is not simply true of our society today, but it is true of every society that has or will exist. Thus, the basis of Weaver’s argument is the foursquare acceptance of the metaphysics of realism because only a dualism of the spiritual and the physical will provide him with the order of truth and those stable social values from which he criticizes the present age.
The Nominalist Heresy
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