Same-Sex Marriage and the Eclipse of Reality

Bradley C. S. Watson has an interesting commentary in the most recent Claremont Review of Books on the philosophical background on recent moves to “redefine” marriage. Like me, he thinks that supporters are too facile in thinking that they’re simply expanding the definition of marriage to include same-sex partners.

He considers the new right to a “word” an unprecedented development in American constitutional law. This new word-play recalls medieval debates between realists and nominalists:

In the debate over same-sex “marriage,” we are seeing a partial and greatly dumbed-down replay of the medieval debate between realists and nominalists. According to the realists, we possess minds capable of transcending individual phenomena and seeing the objective truth or essences that link phenomena. Thus we know that the phrase “man is a rational animal” is tautological. To this version of the Christian mind, the phenomenal world is a real reflection of God’s creation and mind, and the permanent connections we perceive among the things that compose it are not illusions.

The nominalists, by contrast, emphasized that words cannot express things-in-themselves, for these are unknown and unknowable to us. We intuit only individually existing things, and can perceive, through reason, no ineluctable relationships among them. Words cannot signify universals, only particulars, and to the extent they do point to universals, they are but sound and fury, signifying nothing. For the nominalists, to claim we can know things in themselves, or a universal natural order, is to be impious and full of hubris�??it is a claim to read the mind, and therefore constrain the actions, of God.

Shorn of faith, however, the nominalist position turns into a “make it up as you go” philosophy, which people today would call the ideology of the “expressive self”:

According to the Massachusetts court’s majority, one must “have the right to marryâ€???or more properly, the right to choose to marry” in order to be fully human. The language of the court is significant, for it reduces essence to action, or the right to choose certain actions or commitments over othersâ€???thereby denying essence. For the court, modern psychological reductionismâ€???“I choose therefore I am”â€???is the only philosophical position worth taking seriously. Even the dissenters in the case eschew essentialism. They appear reluctant to redefine marriage only because of the lack of scientific consensus that such redefinition “will not have unintended and undesirable social consequences.” In either case, the essential natures of human beings and therefore their relationships to each other are reduced to choice and its consequences.

Notice even opponents of same-sex marriage get sucked into the nominalism because they agree with proponents that the issue is one’s right to choose, which locates the debate in the subjectivism of the individual instead of the thing itself of marriage.

Even so, supporters of same-sex marriage must rely on a residual realism in their new “definition”:

Of course, most deconstructionists would, at this point, say that the law should not and would not sanction as marriage the union of a man and 12 women, or a man and a sow. But they cannot, on the principles enunciated by the supreme courts of Vermont or Massachusetts, say why, for the principles are not themselves rational. The deconstructionists are wed, apparently, to a residual prejudice that might or will soon give way before autonomy’s incessant march. In its anti-rationalism, theirs is a mysticism not fundamentally different from the medieval mysticisms set up in opposition to realism, or the Oriental mysticisms that emphasize the illusory character of the phenomenal world and thereby oppose themselves to Western rationalism.

But the deconstructionist mysticism differs from the medieval in one key respect: its complete substitution of liberal purposes for God’s. The contemporary nominalists possess theological conviction in abundance: they are as pious in their own way as their medieval forebears. Impiety to medieval nominalists came from those who would purport to read the mind of God and therefore limit His freedom; to the moderns, impiety comes from limiting our own freedom.

Watson’s article connects some of the dots that my own arguments have missed. He shows how the deconstructionism of SSM’s supporters is both internally incohrent but also a puffery of mystical liberal piety. This combination helps to explain why, for some, SSM isn’t simply about “acceptance,” but it’s a postmodern attempt to recreate the social world in their own self-expressive image. Albert Camus’s The Rebel provides a useful analysis of this phenomenon in Western history, especially since the French Revolution.

Watson concludes with a reference to Orwell and thought-crime. They change the language so some thoughts become unthinkable. Even so:

But the long-term prospect is, from one point of view, better. As the silent artillery of time wreaks its inevitable havoc on the chords of our memory, we will not have to fear being adjudged guilty of thoughtcrime because we will no longer have a word to express that which… someone, somewhere, once meant by the union of a man and a woman. Unconsciousness will be, perhaps, our best defense.