17

NOTE

Identity and Telos:
Political Questions as Metaphysics andMetaphysics as Political Questions in
Christendom and the Enlightenment
Jason Morgan
Contemporary philosopher Michael Sandel terms the Cartesian individual exercising
Hobbesian autonomy in a world without abiding attachment the unencumbered self .

The

unencumbered self, Sandel says, rules out the possibility of what we might call constitutive
ends. 1） For Sandel, various unencumbered selves, linked into ad hoc communities bypolitical power but with no abiding attachments implied, are the building blocks of modern
politics and other associative activities.
Seen from this perspective, the traditional ways of categorizing human beings, such as
belonging to nations（from Latin natus, born［to, into］）, religious groups, tribes,
professional guilds, or clans ─ and later to nation-states and, even more artiﬁcially, to races─ hold no real taxonomic power over the radically autonomous self.

It is not that someone

is or is not, say, a female, a Catholic, a Mayan, a nurse, a Guatemalan, or a Latina ─ allthings that many people would predicate of a person with two χ chromosomes who was bornand raised in Guatemala City to an old Mayan family and who spent her weekdays caring forpatients at a hospital and her Sunday mornings at Holy Mass.

Rather, it is that anyone canchoose to be any of these things, regardless of tradition, training, or communal understanding of belonging.

If the unencumbered self is a free radical, it can attach to any cluster ofatoms and become part of any gathering of other free radicals, based only on the will.

As

has been shown by a number of bewildering news items over the past decade, white women
can identify as black, men can identify as women, women can identify as men, adults
can identify as babies, and, in some cases, humans can identify as hippopotamuses, dogs,
elves, or anything else imaginable.2）

1） Michael Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, 162, cited in David Gordon,
Michael Sandel’s Case for Statism, at Mises.org, published January 17, 2006. https://mises.org/es/
library/michael-sandels-case-statism
2） See Andy Pulman and Jacqui Taylor, Munchausen by Internet: Current Research and Future. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2011,
Directions, Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 14, no. 4（Jul. ─ Aug., 2012）

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No. 85, 2020

Identity, or willed belonging indifferent to traditional, biological, or institutionalrecognition of membership, has slowly become the ground of modern politics, even ofmodernity.

But what is identity, in this voluntarist-political sense, and how did it overtakemuch older, and, one would think, more demanding markers of group membership?

Whatis the identity of identity, the intellectual history of what is, properly speaking, an anti-idea, atriumph of the will?

Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and

the Politics of Resentment（New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018）, is an attempt tounderstand and explain the identity phenomenon, and then to weave it into a larger
understanding of the modern political landscape while prognosticating the future of what
Sandel might call the clothed unencumbered self .
Fukuyama, of course, gained worldwide notoriety with the publication of his 1989 essay,
The End of History? and then follow-up book, The End of History and the Last Man.3）
Fukuyama’s argument in that suite was essentially Hegelian. The spirit of History, in thesense in which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel（1770 ─ 1831）had vindicated the politicoepistemological dogma of liberal democracy, was portrayed by Fukuyama as having brought
the drama of history to a close, with the struggle for political format decided with the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.4） As Fukuyama puts it in the closing
passages of The End of History and the Last Man, what remains of history resembles aprocession of wagons coming over a hill, all destined to arrive at the end of history, namely,
liberal democracy.

What comes after the end of history is a sort of post-Hegelian

promised land in which the world has arrived, or will soon arrive, at a political equilibrium,
all liberal, all democratic, all taking part in the spirit of Hegelianism.
In Identity, Fukuyama is back on familiar Hegelian ground.
argument is more multiplex.

But this time Fukuyama’s

The ﬁrst blush of triumphant Hegelianism is gone, done awaywith by the surge of movements around the world rejecting the liberal-democratic
ascendancy, even ﬁnality, that Fukuyama peddled as a younger man, that rejection stemminglargely, if not exclusively, from the failure of liberal democracy as a political system to satisfy
the masses that liberal democrats claimed benevolently and disinterestedly to rule.
went wrong?

Why did liberal democracy founder so?

What

Fukuyama is now at pains to saythat the encomium to Hegel that seemed to be the point of his earlier work was not the entire
story.

As he lays out in the preface to Identity, Fukuyama sees himself as having been

Chayla Haynes, Saran Stewart, and Evette Allen, Three Paths, One Struggle: Black Women and Girls
Battling Invisibility in U.S. Classrooms, The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 85, no. 3, Why We Can’t Wait:（Re）Examining the Opportunities and Challenges for Black Women and Girls in Education（Summer2016）, 380 ─ 391, and Emily James, I’ve gone back to being a child’: Husband and father-of-seven, 52,
leaves his wife and kids to live as a transgender SIX-YEAR-OLD girl named Stefonknee, Daily Mail,
December 11, 2015.
3） See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History? The National Interest, no. 16（1989）, 3 ─ 18, and The
End of History and the Last Man（New York, NY: The Free Press, 1992）.
4） See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Popper, The
Open Society and Its Enemies（reissued: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013）.

Identity and Telos

19largely misunderstood in his argument in The End of History.

My critics, Fukuyama

complains, did not note that the original essay had a question mark at the end of the title,
and they did not read the later chapters of The End of History and the Last Man that focusedon the problem of Nietzsche’s Last Man.（xiii） This re-emphasis of the Nietzscheanelement, the voluntaristic and atavistic spirit of the strongman that greatly troubles the likes
of Francis Fukuyama, is a nod to the failure of the original Hegelian argument to account for,and predict, the turn away from liberal democracy that followed after a halcyon decade or soof high globalist liberalism swept much of the world. Fukuyama’s task in Identity is to explain
why his critics, and also he himself, could not come sufﬁciently to terms with the nationalism
and religion that should have long since disappeared were Fukuyama applying a strictly
Hegelian, or democratic-socialist-Marxist, scheme to historical change.

For Fukuyama, it is

the Nietzschean element which was not sufﬁciently incorporated into the Hegelian schema.
To the original atmospherics of Hegelian philosophizing Fukuyama now seeks to inject a due

Nietzschean regard for thymos（θυμός）, the ancient Greek understanding of the part of thesoul that craves recognition of dignity（xiii）.

Fukuyama’s remit in Identity, then, is to graft

onto Hegel the Nietzsche part of the title of his world-famous book, and in so doing torecover identity for Hegelianism, and vice versa.

If thymos can be tamed and Hegelianized,

it can be rendered isothymos, equality of dignity desired and proffered. This done, theHegelian end of history can get back on track, and the challenges to Fukuyama’s ideology
can be discounted and the ideology preserved.
But it is precisely because Hegelianism is an ideology, a closed episteme with heavily
Gnostic overtones, that Fukuyama’s project is doomed from the outset.5） Indeed, Fukuyamian Hegelianism conceals much more than it reveals.

Fukuyama’s predication of earlymodern and modern history on Hegelian dialectics creates an automatic tautology of historical unfolding.

According to the Fukuyamian position of neo-Hegelianism, liberal

democracy is not just a destination for history but also an epistemology in its own right.
When Fukuyama cites Samuel Huntington and Larry Diamond, for example, and in particular
the latter’s notion of a democratic recession following the rise in the number of democratic
states following the demise of Soviet Russia, the baseline for the analysis is that liberal
democracy is the way the world should both look and be.（3 ─ 6）
The extension of liberal democracy is the neo-Kantian project of globalization and one
world government. Fukuyama grows especially impatient with questions about globalization and all of its attendant policies, such as open borders and unrestricted free trade.
When these things do not work, Fukuyama retreats from his Hegelian bailey to his Nietzschean motte, seeing the dark undercurrents of the human psyche at work in the frustrationof the Hegelianism that should have gone according to globalist plans.

This is the episte-5） See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction（Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987）.

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No. 85, 2020

mological tautology of liberal democracy that blinds Fukuyama and others like him.
Fukuyama attempts to encapsulate the world in globalism and its conceits ─ to begin withliberal democracy and also end up there ─ and, when anyone objects, to fault them forhaving been slighted in globalism gone a little too far, too fast.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the very ﬁrst sentence of Identity reads, This bookwould not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November
2016. （ix）President Trump is the wooden stake to the heart of the seemingly deathless
G. W. F. Hegel, and Fukuyama can neither forgive nor understand the rejection of what
appears to Fukuyama to be the is and the ought of the political world.

What follows islargely the same old story of resentment, the mean-spirited disavowal of the goods ofliberal democracy.

Ironically, this emphasis on resentment reads much like Nietzschean

ressentiment, although for obvious reasons Fukuyama is silent on this point. Instead,
Fukuyama sticks to resentment as he and his fellow liberals now choose to deﬁne it, namely, as the refusal to abide by the liberal-democratic order.

Resentment is also a heuristic

device for investigating why Hegelianism does not ride smoothly at anchor.

In Identity, it is

the resentment at indignities（8）that Fukuyama wants to understand, why Hegelianism
tends to eddy in identity politics.
It is a perfect confluence of intellectual historical strands when Fukuyama acknowledges that identity politics was a term popularized by developmental psychologist Erik
Erikson（1902 ─ 1994）in the 1950s.（9）Echoing the psychological jargon of that time,
Fukuyama sets his terms out in this way:
In this book, I will be using identity in a speciﬁc sense that helps us understandwhy it is so important to contemporary politics.

Identity grows, in the ﬁrst place, outof a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules andnorms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity.

Indi-viduals throughout human history have found themselves at odds with their societies.
But only in modern times has the view taken hold that the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and the outer society systematically wrong and unfair in its valuation of
the former. It is not the inner self that has to be made to conform to society’s rules,
but society itself that needs to change.
The inner self is the basis of human dignity, but the nature of that dignity isvariable and has changed over time.

In many early cultures, dignity is attributed toonly a few people, often warriors who are willing to risk their lives in battle.

In othersocieties, dignity is an attribute of all human beings, based on their intrinsic worth aspeople with agency.

And in other cases, dignity is due to one’s membership in a larger

group of shared memory and experience.
Finally, the inner sense of dignity seeks recognition.

It is not enough that I havea sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if
they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence.

Self-esteem［a term Fukuyama

Identity and Telos

21

earlier problematized in his discussion of the California Task Force to Promote SelfEsteem and Personal Social Responsibility（93 ff.）
］arises out of esteem by others.
Because human beings naturally crave recognition, the modern sense of identity
evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individuals demand public recognition of
their worth.

Identity politics thus encompasses a large part of the political struggles of

the contemporary world, from democratic revolutions to new social movements, fromnationalism and Islamism to the politics on contemporary American university campuses.

Indeed, the philosopher［sic］Hegel argued that the struggle for recognition was

the ultimate driver of human history, a force that was key to understanding the emergence of the modern world.（9 ─ 10）
The stage is thus set at the beginning for the morality play that will unfold.

Fukuyama

sees society as a Hegelian ground of competing thymoi, with isothymos the equivalent,perhaps, of Ludwig von Mises’ evenly-rotating economy, a state never achieved but always
just over the horizon.6） Once human existence is seen as the drama of a craving for selfesteem working out against the struggle to have others esteem one, then it becomes easy toposit identity as the vehicle of that struggle. Fukuyama sees identity as helping us
understand that economic inequality, one of his other oft-repeated watchwords, cannot be
solved without a more complex view of the human soul（11）, as Fukuyama puts it, prior to
identity but leading into it.
The rest of the book follows, much of it formulaically, from these premises. We get
the usual smattering of Socrates and Plato, for example, and the conﬂation of identity with awhole range of practices and appearances（homosexuality getting leveled out, for instance,and entirely miscategorized in the process, to nationality or ethnic background（see, e.g.,
Chapter Two, The Third Part of the Soul, featuring the debate between Adeimantus andGlaucon in Plato’s Republic over the nature of a just city（15））. And as the leveling of theself goes, so goes democracy, for which non-leveled selves are anathema.

Predemocraticsocieties rested on a foundation of social hierarchy, Fukuyama explains:so this belief in the inherent superiority of a certain class of people［which Fukuyama above calls megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior’］was
fundamental to the maintenance of social order.

The problem with megalothymia isthat for every person recognized as superior, far more people are seen as inferior anddo not receive any public recognition of their human worth.（21）The fundamental problem with Fukuyama’s position is that liberal democracy is not agood lens through which to view anything besides liberal democracy. Plato was not aliberal democrat, and so Fukuyama has trouble pressing him into service in support of postEnlightenment ideas.

Here we find the rub, the Enlightenment disfiguring of human6） On the evenly-rotating economy, see Israel M. Kirzner, Entrepreneurial Discovery and theCompetitive Market Process: An Austrian Approach, Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 35, no. 1（Mar.,
1997）, 60 ─ 85.

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beings.

No. 85, 2020

The Enlightenment’s loss of the concept of the human person ─ the beginning of

the long slide toward what Sandel rightly diagnoses as the unencumbered self ─ is theunderlying weakness of Fukuyama’s concept of identity.
Fukuyama relies heavily on Jean-Jacques Rousseau（1712 ─ 1778）, for instance, for hisargument that the feeling, thinking person with an interior life grew out of Rousseauan
emotionalism and the vistas of the interiority of the other（see, e.g., 109 ─ 110）
.7） And Fukuyama’s Rousseau grows out of a post-Christendom Enlightenment Europe opened up by
Martin Luther（1483 ─ 1546）and other Protestants（Rousseau hailed from Calvinist Geneva）
for consideration of the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep
and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection, adevelopment Fukuyama credits to Martin Luther.（28） The Catholic Church, Fukuyama
asserts via Luther, acted only on the outer person ─ through confession, penance, alms,
worship of saints ─ none of which could make a difference because grace was bestowed
only as a free act of love by God.（26） Luther rejected the Universal Church, Fukuyama
continues, but he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.（29） In otherwords, before there was the Enlightenment, there were no ﬁt subjects for liberal democracy,
and so the Hegelian world that Fukuyama sees as ending with the triumphs of the last
decade of the twentieth century did not really begin until the ﬁfth decade of the seventeenth,with the Westphalian settlement of the question of the Church’s involvement in what are
now termed secular affairs .

Before Luther, Fukuyama seems to believe, no one had

plumbed the underlying truth of Christianity .

Luther was an individualist pioneer who

struck out on his own path to divine what divinity had left unsaid until Luther’s arrival.
The rest of modern history is, for Fukuyama, a variation on this theme.

From theatomized believers, each his own priest, freed from thralldom to Rome arose a myriad ofProtestant denominations which all had to grapple with the problems of authority and unity
in the face of ascendant isothymia. Thomas Hobbes（1588 ─ 1679）tried to solve this problem
in Leviathan, and since Hobbes endless others have also attempted to impose order upon ascattering of unencumbered selves.8） Eventually, groups, and not necessarily religious
groups either, began to take precedence over the individuals constituting them.

What hadbegun in the dissolution of one kind of megalothymia ended up in another. This trend
accelerated when even national allegiances, which had saved Europe from International
Socialism in the wake of World War I, gave way to the unencumbered self replete with thepower to reject even birthright and national identity in pursuit of any form of belonging it
chose.

From the 1970s, lived experience ─ which as Fukuyama explains grows out of the7） See Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse（1761）, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded（1740）, and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History（New York: W.W. Norton andCompany Press, 2007）, as well as the review of Hunt’s book by Belinda Walzer in Comparative LiteratureStudies, vol. 46, no. 1（2009）, 193 ─ 196.
8） See, e.g., Carl Schmitt, tr. George D. Schwab, The Concept of the Political（Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996）.

Identity and Telos

23

German distinction between Erfahrung（ experiences that could be shared, as when people
witnessed chemistry experiments in different laboratories ）and Erlebnis（ the subjective
perception of experiences, which might not necessarily be shareable ）（109）
─ became theorganizing, or disorganizing, principle of, well, lived experience. Modern life became, as
summed up by Walter Benjamin（1892 ─ 1940）, a series of shock experiences’ that prevented individuals from seeing their lives as a whole and made it hard to convert Erlebnis to
Erfahrung, producing for Benjamin a new kind of barbarism’ in which communal memory
breaks down into a series of individual experiences.（109）9） This is the peril of identity
politics, a new barbarism wherein pure Erlebnis produces a hyper-thymos-ism of every
Hobbesian, Cartesian, Lutheran self competes with every other, a war of all against all in
pursuit of the Nietzschean fulﬁllment of the promises of Hegel.
But things need not be so bleak, Fukuyama argues. There are ways in which liberal
democracy can cater to the needs of the individual for thymotic recognition while alsopreserving the isothymic equilibrium required for liberal democracy to function in the ﬁrst
place. However, more trouble lies ahead with this move. Fukuyama says that the
emergence of the self-aware self, also aware that others are equally sentient, which is anecessary condition for liberal democracy and human rights, comes from Rousseau（109 ─
110）, but it does not.

Dignity, the valuing of the other as the self, is not a Rousseauan or an

Enlightenment concept at all.

It is a Catholic one. Fukuyama gives no indication that hehas studied anything of the Church beyond what Martin Luther said about it.

This, andFukuyama’s other, earlier mistaking of Lutheran caricatures for authentic Catholic teaching,indicates that the Enlightenment, as represented by latter-day Hegelians such as Fukuyama,
is a poor guide to Christendom, which the Enlightenment claims to have succeeded.

Thisis unfortunate, because it is precisely the traces of Christendom that Fukuyama has spent
his life studying, all the while believing himself to be focusing on early modern and modern
political philosophy.
Consider, as a foil to Fukuyama’s Identity, a recent book by historian Andrew Willard
Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St.
Louis（Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017）. In this book, Jones argues that theFrance of King Louis VIII（1187 ─ 1226）and St. Louis IX（1214 ─ 1270）was not divided
between secular and sacred, as most scholars since the so-called Enlightenment havetended to argue.

According to Jones, the society of Ludovican France during the thirteenth

century was one of what Henri de Lubac（1896 ─ 1991）called the complete act : negotium
pacis et fidei, the business of the peace and the Faith .

There was no Church and State,

but a societal whole in which the whole human person, material and spiritual, was incorpo9） See also Tomoko Masuzawa, Tracing the Figure of Redemption: Walter Benjamin’s Physiognomyof Modernity, MLN, vol. 100, no. 3, German Issue（Apr., 1985）, 514 ─ 536, and Thijs Lijster, All
Reiﬁcation Is a Forgetting’: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Dialectic of Reiﬁcation, in Samir Gandesha andJohan F. Hartle, eds., Reification and Spectacle（Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017）.

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No. 85, 2020

rated into a complete societal and sacramental act, equally material and spiritual.

In otherwords, there was no Cartesian split ─ people were whole, the Faith was whole, the realm
was whole, and the king and the pope ultimately had the same job, namely, the maintenanceof the peace. The maintenance of the peace was the complete act of the human person.
The anthropology of the Middle Ages was fundamentally different than the Cartesian,atomistic, voluntaristic deracinated misanthropology of the Enlightenment and after.
The implications of this for political philosophy are profound.

When read against thegrain, and in light of the truths expounded in Jones’ book, we find that we moderns areforced to confront the possibility that we have gotten the most basic thing ─ our identity ─
entirely wrong. Failing to know our identity, we have splintered into ten thousand identities, all tacit confessions that we do not know who we really are.

Jones was not the ﬁrst tounderstand this, of course. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard（1813 ─ 1855）, for
example, puzzled at the Hegelian-professing scientist who, ﬁguratively, Kierkegaard saw asliving in a hut outside of the palatial philosophical system he had constructed. Kierkegaard’s perplexity was extrapolated by Walker Percy（1916 ─ 1990）, the Louisiana philosopher whose novel, The Moviegoer（1961）, was an exploration of this theme of alienation, ofwhat Percy called being lost in the cosmos, the human person seeking for love in theruins of the Church.10） This whole-person understanding, a culmination of the rich anthropology of the Mishnah and the rabbinical reﬂections on the revealed will of God, orientated
man to an end, not within himself, but infinitely above and beyond. That Lutheranism,liberalism, and their offshoots fascism, communism, and identitarianism cannot do this isprecisely because the ﬁrst step of these ideologies is a rejection of the whole-person teleologic anthropology of Christendom and its Jewish teachers.11）
Absent this teleology, man collapses into a meaningless heap, a physical thing, or
perhaps a thing with noumenal tendencies, but without any sustainable identity beyond
himself.

He becomes the Cartesian self, unencumbered, as Sandel argued.

It is this selfthat Francis Fukuyama is trying to understand in Identity, a self somewhat more complex
than the liberal-democratic self in the shadow of the Hegelian Geist, inﬂated and animatedby a faux-Platonic Nietzschean thymos craving recognition（as Hegel also argued）but fallingback into resentment if denied it.

This self is, to be sure, the self that Hobbes saw as the10） Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith, eds., A Political Companion to Walker Percy, Ch. 1,
Walker Percy: A Brief Biography, by Ralph C. Wood, citing Walker Percy, Conversations with Walker
Percy, ed. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor Kramer（Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985）, 127. See
also Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book（New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983）and Lovein the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World（New York: Farrar,
Straus, 1971）.
11） See David Berger, Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of theJews（Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011）, Igor H. De Souza, Rewriting Maimonides: Early
Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed（Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018）, and A. G.
Roeber, What the Law Requires Is Written on their Hearts: Noachic and Natural Law among GermanSpeakers in Early Modern North America, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 4（Oct., 2001）,
883 ─ 912.

Identity and Telos

element of political life.

25

But as Andrew Jones reminds us, there is another way ofunderstanding the self, namely as a whole, and capable of seeking peace and not just theabsence of conﬂict, concord, and not just Fukuyama’s warmed over isothymia.
The moral life demands that we understand the moral subject, namely the humanperson, in his or her full dignity, transcending every political ideology or other reductive
scheme.

Identity in the Fukuyamian, Hegelio-Nietzschean, Eriksonian sense is not identity

suitable for a human person if it does not take into account the nature of the person: made inlove for peace, and not evolved in bloodshed for war. Fukuyama seeks to understandidentity, but by reducing it at the outset to the unencumbered pinball self of liberal democracy, he defeats his own project before it even gets underway.

The constitutive ends ofwhich Sandel speaks are more than mere ancillaries to morality, they are determinative of it.
Francis Fukuyama’s Identity, therefore, is best read in concert with a book such as that byAndrew Jones, which gives a whole-person account of who we are, and why we want tobelong in the ways that we do.