St Michael Society

The Catholic philosophical tradition has long recognized a basic distinction (that the Greeks had already discerned) between speculative and practical orders of knowledge. Simply put, rational processes are “speculative” when their goal is to know reality in and of itself. Distinctly, “practical” kinds of reasoning are ordered toward making or doing something in particular. Similarly, we distinguish between “theoretical” and “applied” divisions of some sciences.

The speculative philosopher seeks to know what the human is. What makes all humans be what they are, always and everywhere? What is the raison d’être of the human creature? Classically, the answer is something like the following: All “human beings” are animals that possess the capacity for moral freedom. All human life is personal. To be pro-life is, more accurately, to be pro-person. Those of us who recognize this say “pro-life” because pro-abortion activists do not admit that all human life is sufficiently personal: the pro-abortionist generally believes that only those who can exercise choice are worthy of having their lives preserved.

Most of us are not habitually speculative thinkers. But each of us is routinely practical, ordered, as we are, for the exercise of moral freedom. And even if we don’t know this in a speculative way – in a clear, definitional sort of way – we know it from our concrete experience: The goodness of our lives depends on ordering our understanding and hopes into particular acts of doing this thing or that, whether life-changing or mundane. Each of us, to be sure, has an agenda.

The difficulty is that the subject of morality, and more specifically, of politics and public policy, melds these two categories together. Those whose prerogative it is to judge what is beneficial for a particular society of persons must know what makes it a society “of persons” to begin with.

 Government, then, must be thoughtful in a speculatively practical kind of way.

 But this distinction between “speculative” and “practical” is rejected by the modern world. Karl Marx proclaimed that reason’s reason is not to understand the world but to change it. The American philosopher (and impresario of predominant educational theories), John Dewey, said, “Truth is what works.” In our own day, we are encouraged to “Just do it” … as the motto’s own icons evidently do.

 And a Constitution manifestly conceived as based upon essential truths is claimed to be “living.”

 So what’s the problem? Well, if a society is unable to believe, much less converse in speculative truth, its practical judgments can only be based on other practical judgments. And if practical judgments are not moored to speculative truths, the only thing that can make one practical judgment more convincing than another is the influence of power. This play of suasion and power is what we pejoratively mean by “politics.”

“Pro-choice” activists for abortion-rights are pragmatists. They “defend” the rights of those who are actively capable of exercising choice. They dismiss the radical continuity between the relative ability to exercise choice (in the competent adult) and the radical capacity to exercise choice that begins when human life is identifiable, both by modern science and classical philosophy. But it is this capacity to exercise choice that remains throughout human development, even when a competent adult is sleeping, or when senility renders him or her no longer actively able to make free decisions.

Our government and media certainly need to become more speculative; but we the people actually need to become even more practical, and fight the good fight against our culture’s murderous ignorance.

Rev. Bruno M. Shah, O.P.