Liberal will

Kahn again: “My most fundamental claim is that liberalism lacks an adequate conception of the will.” This is not because liberalism fails to talk about will. It does constantly, pointing to the will exercised in the formation of social contract and the will manifest in political and economic interests. But this liberal will is a very thin one: “The liberal will is fundamentally without content.” The content of the social contract arises from reason, contracts derive their content from interest: “The liberal will is a kind of second-order faculty, affirming a relationship either to an object or to others that has its source and justification in these faculties of reason and interest . . . the will attaches to the products of reason or the objects of desire, but has nothing of its own to add.”

What does the will add?

Kahn thinks that the will joins particular and universal. Will is always the will of some particular someone, but “will is not exhausted in the particularity of the individual.” Rather, “will is the faculty by which, or through which, we understand ourselves as participants in a meaningful world. This is not a world of abstract ideas, but rather one in which ideas are always attached to particular subjects.” Drawing again on theological analogies, he suggests that will is “a capacity to experience an ultimate or transcendent value as an historical experience in the world . . . . Through the will we do not transcend the world, yet we find ourselves in a world of transcendent value.” Will puts flesh on ideas: “For the will, the body is a point of revelation of a meaning that simultaneously defines the self and is greater than the self.” That means that will is closely associated to love, and love stands outside liberal theory.

In short, “Religion, politics, and love all demand an understanding of the will that is simply unavailable in the liberal tradition. The reason at the center of liberalism rapidly becomes a demand that one’s actions and one’s demands be reasonable. Reasonable means moderate and reciprocal: one must offer fair terms of cooperation to others, which requires a willingness to abide by a common set of standards. A will in thrall to the infinite is not easily bound by the reasonable. Neither religious belief nor love is reasonable. Neither, in the end, are our political practices. They too are founded on faith.”

A thicker account of will brings to the fore the “erotic character of the political.” He returns to the issue of sacrifice: We need an account of the will that makes sense of the political community’s ability to demand “that we sacrifice the self for the maintenance of the political community.” As Kahn says, not just any community can do that; the Kiwanis can’t, nor the bowling club. We need to be brought “face to face with an idea of the politics of the will that presents an ultimate value and demands of us that we be wiling to sacrifice.”