The Private Public

In a 2008 essay in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin (since reprinted elsewhere), Oliver O’Donovan observes that understanding “difference as plurality” reflects an anxiety about difference. Not all difference creates anxiety, but only those differences of “practical principle” that form subcultures that “act on contrary assumptions and pursue divergent courses in their relations with each other.”

From this angle, O’Donovan ponders why we add an “ism” to the word “pluralism.” Pluralism treats these differences of practical principle as “a foundational problem, given in the very nature of social inaction.” Pluralism turns our anxiety of difference-as-plurality into a design feature of social life.

Pluralism “copes” with this danger by distinguishing “different orders of practical principles to govern conduct.” In addition to our community-specific principles that govern our subcultures, we must adopt a set of “second-order principles” to govern our interactions across tribal boundaries. These principles form “a regime of practical thinking detached from all fundamental principles of action,” in short a “public reason.”

O’Donovan is suspicious of this “family of proposals,” since the solution perpetuates the fears that are supposed to be resolved: “the object of anxiety and the proposal for coping with anxiety are, in fact, one and the same: an ‘ideal type’ of society, which is fissile, segmented, held together by principles belonging to none of its component parts.” This indicates, he thinks, that pluralism is not just a “practical anxiety” but a “metaphysic of society.” It posits an ontology of society, and seeks to convert our disposition to accept “our ontological situation gracefully.” Hence, once again, the “ism.”

O’Donovan also questions in what sense is pluralism’s public reason is “public.” Public and private necessitate one another, and “the private is defined negatively, by privation . . . by walling off, excluding, refusing entry. Private thought, domestic privacy, property, private association, and so on are those withheld from universal access.”

“Public” negates this negation, cutting openings in the wall to permit entry. Or so it seems. But public areas also exclude. A public school is open to all students, but not to everyone. When applied to “reason,” the word “public” is even more exclusionary. In its essence, public reason is “constructed by privation, like another kind of private sphere” in that it doesn’t admit “moral identifies formed behind its back, in private.” The public of public reason is not the town square but “more like a walled and barbed-wired garrison, bristling with warnings against entry by unauthorized personnel. It is a public conceived as another kind of privacy.”

Public so conceived creates problems as we try to move from “private” to “public.” We know that the disciplines of the one order are not the same as the disciplines of the other, but the two must cohere. There must be a way of “linking the performance of any individual in public and the same individual’s performance in private.” If the two are separated, then public disciplines are no longer disciplines but simple prohibitions. Public reason thus “must bypass the moral reasoning of those who participate in it,” and this can only leave public actors “devoid of reasons that could lead us to act.” As a result, the “second-order” reasons of public reason “are, in fact, not reasons at all, because they do not derive from, or connect with, first-order reasons.”

For Christians, what public reason excludes is charity: “Charity is a hegemonic principle; that is to say, it generates not only private but public forms of conduct, shaping a homologous identity that can move between the private and the public. If hegemonic traditions are to be expelled from society, charity, a tradition born of the Christian gospel, must be expelled.” Should Christians leave their love at the doorway as they enter public space?

So: “Public reason” is public in the sense that it is a tightly defined private space, a space that excludes charity, which is the Christian reason for engagement in public life at all.