In America, the escalating violence of 2016 demonstrated fundamental dilemmas in our public and civil discourse. This essay proposes that the unrest and social fragmentation seen before and after the election provides both an opportunity and an urgent case for a deep reconsideration of our warring ideologies. From the vantage point of our sister country France, this article frames an effort to evaluate American philosophical frameworks using French culture as both a touchstone and a foil. Through this process of looking from the outside in, we can rediscover the American idea in all of its beauty, complexity, and paradoxes.
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
— G.K. Chesterton
In February of 2015, my wife Kathryn and I made a leap of faith. We left the comfort and security of Washington, D.C. where we had lived for over 15 years to go on an adventure, an open-ended sojourn in France. To many of my friends and colleagues, this decision to uproot seemed to be the wrong time to move to a country they perceived as a political, economic, and social basket case. The economy was deep in the malaise of the administration of socialist President François Hollande. Two weeks before we landed in Paris, a string of terrorist attacks shocked the world. Over the next year, we would experience more terrorist attacks and violence; the questions and concerns from our closest relations persisted.
As we left Washington, my wife, Kathryn, had a clear story. As an interior designer, everyone understood why she would move to the City of Lights. Paris is the international capital of design and fashion. She could explore the markets, experience the historic center of the art world firsthand, and deepen her expertise in her craft as a designer. In fact, she has already directly experienced the value of the “French Touch” in her work.
What about my reasons for coming to France? To even some of my closest friends the narrative was unclear and complex. Why would a leader in a successful start-up, with a professional network based in Washington, D.C., and a maturing career move from the center of American political and military power to a country notorious for its anti-business attitude? The irony that I was paid to help my clients clarify complex problems and yet I could not explain my professional choices to my friends was not lost on me. But then again, it is also not uncommon for the 'shoemakers children to have no shoes.'
Well, I did have a partial excuse. I had a client in London and my consulting firm was developing more opportunities in Europe. But the narrative begins to break down after I was asked the question, "Why not move to London?" The United Kingdom is perceived to be much friendlier to business and start-ups than France. Having a shared culture and shared language would have made our move to Europe much easier. Maybe, I could have justified that to be successful in international business I needed to be able to speak another language and understand life in another culture. This narrative would have been a more believable answer, but it is not the real one. It was not authentically why I moved to Paris.
Blaise Pascal captured my conundrum when he said "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing about." In some ways, it took me over a year to unpack what I intuitively felt when we chose to move. In the previous decade before the move, working in and around politics and government, I had the deep sense that something was fundamentally flawed in our social and political dialogue. Every year the ideological divides seemed to grow stronger and louder. In all of this chaos and confusion, I needed to make sense of what I really believed. The partisan ideology I was given had become a constricting straight jacket. I knew deep down that I had to leave Washington. I was drawn to Paris but I could not quite articulate why.
Early on in our time in France, I had the chance to meet one of my intellectual heroes, the philosopher Jean Vanier, for a lunch. He was as generous and wise as he was in his writings. He was curious about my time in Washington and about my experience working in politics. He said, "Ron, your politicians are becoming more and more ideological, taking abstract ideas and forcing them onto reality. Do you know where this leads?" I sat in a moment of rapt silence. He responded gravely, "It leads to violence." Little did I know that his words in 2015 would prophetically predict the violence of 2016. I asked him for the antidote to this problem. Unlike Plato who contemplated abstract forms of reality to build his philosophy, Aristotle used observation and interaction with the common man to guide his reason. For example, to learn about the nature of fish for his works on biology, Aristotle would talk to to fisherman at the port to get their real life perspective. Jean Vanier believed a philosophy based on real human experience would lead to a right relationship to reality, encouraging peace not violence. His insight became the first puzzle piece to fall into place.
The Thinker by Auguste Rodin at the Musée de Rodin
This conversation with Vanier sparked an idea. What if I could spend my time in France to learn the philosophical method as a way to explore the human experience and then use this insight in my work as an advisor and in my civic life as an American citizen. To study philosophy, I needed to be ready to go against the grain of my native culture. I come from practical Midwestern stock. Where I grew up, survival during the Great Depression and the dust bowls of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath were not stories from a book but were part of the family narrative. Philosophy did not put food on the table; it was not necessary for survival and middle class prosperity. Beyond this, Americans, on the whole, do not study the great philosophical traditions. It is not in our cultural DNA. Alexis de Tocqueville aptly described the the intellectual method of my fellow Americans:
"To evade the bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class opinions, and in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better; to seek the reason of things for oneself, and in oneself alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to strike through the form to the substance - such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of Americans...I discover that in most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to individual effort of his own understanding...America is one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and are best applied."
De Tocqueville, in his journeys through America in the mid-nineteenth century, witnessed that the by this point the American mind was highly individualistic, skeptical of all systemic ways at looking at the world, and fundamentally pragmatic. If an idea could not be used immediately to solve a problem or make money, than it was not of interest to the general public. This rang true from my personal and professional experience. If American's are still fundamentally Cartesian, unconscious followers of the method of Descartes, I wondered about the implications for how this plays out in our social and political life. If we do not consider the philosophical tradition, which for past Western societies was essential, what are we missing? Surprisingly, our founders did not have this outlook. In America's political development, the Founders were deeply influenced by ancient Roman and Greek philosophy, the British philosophies of Locke, Hume, and Smith, as well as by the French Enlightenment thinkers of Voltaire and Rousseau. In moving to the very neighborhood where these thinkers met and changed the world, I was also able to walk the streets where the philosopher statesmen Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams walked as they negotiated both war and peace of our revolutionary birth. One block away from my apartment where I write, these leaders signed the Treaty of Paris that created our United States of America that still stands today as official recognition of our ‘free, sovereign and independent states.”
This statue of Thomas Jefferson, near Port de Solferino, stands close to the River Seine where he used to walk often when he was Ambassador to France.
After over two centuries of social life in America, what do we think and believe now? Are there dominant shared philosophies or just a incoherent swirl of "individual efforts"? Do our ideas about how we live socially and politically need to adapt as we enter the 21st century? Each major turning point in our history, largely driven by war or social unrest, has forced Americans to reconsider our guiding philosophies. As we entered 2016, I believed that our crisis of violence and social unrest provided a case for a deep, interegation of all our beliefs. I asked myself, “could I retrace the steps of our American intellectual journey and use the methods of Aristotle to understand what was most human, most reasonable about our current political ideas and frameworks?” If so, I could ensure that my social and political philosophy, was both coherent and built on the solid ground of reason and human experience.
“A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty and the point of life. ”
As this idea crystalized, I faced two troubling realities: I had no formal training in philosophy and I did not know French. In the margins of my advisory work, I began the slog of French intensive courses and met regularly with a French dialogue expert. In a serendipitous encounter in my first year in France, I met two philosophical guides, Professors Antoine Guggenheim and Diane d'Audiffret, who were willing to take me under their wings. In the midst of launching their movement Up for Humanness to facilitate a new dialogue on the future of the human person in the face of AI and globalization, they threw me into the deep end of salons and discussions with some of the leading lights of social and political thought in Paris. Dr. Guggenheim graciously agreed to meet with me on a weekly basis to explore the human person through the metaphysical frameworks of the ancients like Plato and Aristotle but also through the modern insights of phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. I learned that phenomenology was a modern approach to philosophy that concentrates on the study of human consciousness and the objects of direct experience. I was most intrigued by Dr. Guggenheim's special expertise on the phenomonology of Karol Wojtyła, the future pope who later take on communism with his powerful philosophical defense of human freedom and dignity. Slowly, I learned two languages: the French language and the language of philosophy. The corners of the puzzle started to fall into place. I began to see the human experience with fresh eyes and began on this journey to understand a new perspective on human flourishing which would be become a foundation for future work.
During this season, a friend sent me a timely quote from an essay on the creativity that said "the best way to appreciate anything familiar in life is to discover it again; one can grow so inured to something that its essential worth is lost to view; and only by an immense jolt of the imagination can one see it as it really is." In my travels here to France, meeting these new friends, and exploring the new world of philosophy, I began to rediscover my own country, the way we think as Americans and how that influences the way we act in our public lives together. Being outside of my own culture has provided the unique opportunity to look more clearly and appreciate the ever evolving American idea "from the outside in."