David Walsh’s Anamnesis of Modernity: A Preface to a Preface

Abstract

With the publication of The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, David Walsh has completed his trilogy of the modern world that also includes After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom and The Growth of the Liberal Soul. One might characterize Walsh's trilogy as nothing less than an anamnetic recovery of our humanity in the modern world, as he suggests in another venue:

Anamnesis is therefore the recovery, not of a past, but of the present of a conversation that is perpetually available because its fullness is there in every moment from the beginning to the end. What is called forth is not a retrieval from the past but an enlarged awareness of what is already present as the possibility of the encounter itself. . . . The only measure available is that which emerges in the test of existence itself. An existential mode of philosophy consists in the encounter with Being from which the language of being originally sprang. Anamnesis in the modern context must become a recovery not simply of knowledge but of reality (A 17–18).

Walsh's anamnesis moves among modernity's three pillars: rights, science, and the turn to existence (MPR xii). All three volumes consider these three pillars with varying degrees of intensity. Additionally, his reflections within these volumes are of necessity circumscribed by these pillars because they are not to be understood as concepts, but rather as the core of a practice whose nature is intimated only in its unfolding; or, as Kant explains of a related point, our consciousness of the dispositions to virtue can only be known in the effect they have on the mind.