Concilium fall 2021 M. Handy, American revolution, p. 452-453.

MICHAEL HANBY

Noce's genius was to recognize that the root of the

political crisis in the West is not itself political but metaphysical

and religious.' At its core is the elevation of becoming over

Being-in a word, anti-Platonism. "Every revolutionary

of traditional values," he writes, "depends upon this

Initial negation."7 The primacy of becoming replaces the vertical transcendence of eternity with the horizontal transcendence of

futurity. The negation of transcendence eliminates the possibility of "intellectual intuition," an apprehension of being in its

enduring intelligibility, truth, and goodness.' Gone, then, is the ground of the '"religious dimension" presupposed in any genuine act of faith, whose absence sets in motion a historical course

from the atheism in which God is denied to the irreligion in

which the question of God can no longer be asked meaningfully. Gone also is any possibility of traditional theoria. Speculative

————-

5. CM, 140 (emphasis original).

6. CM, 228.

7. CM, 58.

8 Primacy of contemplation just means the superiority of the in

changeable. It just expresses the essential metaphysical principle

atholic tradition, which says that everything that is participates nece

ersal principles, which are the eternal and immutable essences contai

in the permanent actuality of the divine intellect" (AS, 241).

9. See CM, 198; AS, 230.

452

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Contemplative thought is unintelligible, thoroughly

philosophy of praxis." Truth itself is ether measured

efficacy of the action--"the historical reality it is a

roduce"-or it is reduced to historical, sociological, on

chological conditions and functions, that is, to ideology.'

From the anti-Platonic vantage point, the world is "a

stem of forces, not of values."11 The primacy of force elevates

politics over ethics-indeed over everything--even as the nega-

tion of universal reason and human nature undermines the basic

condition of possibility for a genuinely political society: a world

of shared meanings and a common good. Herein lies the novelty

of the new totalitarianism according to Del Noce. It "is not that

of a political movement that aims at world domination" it is,

rather, a wholly negative phenomenon--anti-racist, anti-fascist,

etc.ㅡ"marked by a quest to bring about a disintegration of one

part of the world"' in the name of freedom.12 It is total war le-

gitimated by its perennial opposition to fascism, falsely defined

as whatever sins "'against the progressive direction of history.'1'3

Total revolution could only succeed by bringing the

whole of human nature within its purview, that is, in sexual rev-

lution.14 One of Del Noce's greatest insights is that"scie

and "eroticism" form a unity. They are but two sides of the same

ontological coin and are mutually efficacious in advancing total

revolution. Together, they annihilate all but the barest "biolo-

gistic" conception of human nature with its vital energies. "Na-

ture" is simply whatever can be observed, which means anything

is just as natural--or unnatural--as anything else. The family

must be dissolved; only then can the "meta-empirical order of

truth" finally be abolished.15 The fundamental realities of human

nature--man, woman, mother, father, child--must be perpetu-

ally redefined. History must be erased, since the past is oppres-

sive, by definition, and language, morality, and law must all be

10. CM, 61.

11. CM, 232.

12. CM, 87.

13. CM, 101.

14. See CM,

15. CM, 161

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