Walsh's book After Ideology is about the crisis of modernity and how the twentieth-century ideologies are exemplars of an
erroneous foundation. Now, living in the age After Ideology, Walsh believes that the
"Alternative is in the direction of a rediscovery of the transcendent foundation of order." (Introduction, 1)
Q1. What is this transcendent foundation of order?
One of modernity's chief shifts is the reliance on "ideology" rather than "teleology." With the scientific revolution came the
situation where "that as humanity's power has increased the capacity to virtuously guide its use has declined." (chap. 1, 12)
Q2. How does "ideology" affect the view about the nature of man?
No thinker has exposed the fallacy of modern ideology as Nietzsche. According to Walsh,
"Within his thought all scientific, historical, political, and humanitarian explanations have been stripped away, to reveal the
irreducible will to power that is their animating force. Moreover, he goes on to show how this will has exceeded the perennial
human inclination to wield power over others. In its ideological manifestation, the will to power is rooted in a hatred of reality
and a revolt against its divine source." (chap. 1, 30)
Q3. Do you agree with Nietzsche's critique of modernity? And Walsh's use of Nietzsche to make
his point about the moral bankruptcy of secular humanism?
The silver lining of the mass ideological movements is their engendering crisis of meaning causing man to turn to the spiritual
foundation of order. Walsh's chapter two about "catharsis" discusses particular thinkers who diagnosed the modern sickness as
existential offering a solution of spiritual recovery. At the end of chapter one, Walsh sets up the discussion of catharsis in
this summarizing Voegelinian observation:
"By accepting his (Nietzsche) call to unremitting honesty, the cathartic thinker have carried through his opening toward reality, without
derailing into the self-contracting resolve to dominate it. As a result, they have regained the experiential infrastructure of the great
spiritual symbolisms of the past, especially philosophy and Christianity; with a freshness that is virtually unrivaled. In their work,
philosophy and revelation have become a living reality again, not simply an object of a scholarly or antiquarian revival. The
rediscovery of philosophy and revelation has become a matter of experience, rather than of ideas or abstractions. This has been
possible because of the post-modern recognition that the problems do not simply lie on the level of reason." (chap. 1, 36)
Q4. Walsh believes that the recovery of "philosophic Christianity" in a Voegelinian way is the remedy to
the crisis of modernity. What does "philosophic Christianity" in a Voegelinian way mean?
The cathartic thinkers of Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Camus, and Voegelin all had the capacity to use diagnosis and therapy as correlative
movements toward truth in their work.
Q5. Why does Walsh believe that the diagnosis of the evil of ideology has within it the therapeutic
resources for a remedy? In other words, how can the transcendent source of order become illuminated in the descent to the abyss?
