Josef Pieper makes this qualification to the separation of leisure and culture from the pursuance of (mostly practical) goods:
[T]his is not to say that there is no sort of connection between the fulfilment of the `common good’ and the philosophy taught in a country! Only the relationship can never be established or regulated from the point of view of the general good; when a thing contains it own end or is an end in itself, it can never be made to serve as a means to any other end — just as no one can love someone `in order that’. [Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Liberty Fund, reprint of edition published by Random House, Inc., 1952, page 77]
I also think there to be such a “connection between the fulfilment of the `common good’ and the philosophy taught in a country” and I also can’t say quite what it is. Part of the problem is that of scale, over time and geographical space and over the large and conflicting goals and goods of the various residents of any country. Philosophers cover vast scales in one sense, that of moving up to abstractions which are the stuff from which many concrete situations are shaped, but `goods’ for mortal creatures are mostly those concrete manifestations of bundles of abstractions and we can’t trace back easily or accurately to the abstract stuff of philosophers or — mostly mathematicians and theoretical physicists.
A philosophy can seem right for a country, or more appropriately, a civilization, and it can be conducive to the `common good’, but it’s far too complex and complicated for us to say how it is that Augustinian or Thomistic teachings on political philosophy might have helped create the conditions for the modern liberation of the common man. It seems just as complex and complicated to draw closer to, say, the founding of the United States and to speak about the effects that Locke’s teachings and those of Hobbes may have had on the thoughts of Jefferson or Adams or Hamilton — none of whom seem to have been partisans of a well-formed philosophy as such. It most certainly isn’t easy to understand the effect of the political teachings of the Jesuits who happily passed on the reluctant admission of St. Thomas Aquinas that even a king from a dynasty of long tradition could be overthrown if he refused to serve or couldn’t serve the public good.
There are a number of angles from which I could approach Professor Pieper’s claim but I’ll start with the correction I made in the first sentence of the prior paragraph: though schools of philosophy originate in specific locales, I think countries as we understand them are the wrong scale for true schools of thought grand enough to be named as philosophies. That is, countries are the wrong scale for both time and space. In fact, I think spacetime is the correct setting for such definitions. Our awareness of the human race extends across the entire globe and back to the first stirrings of our single-celled ancestors. We have some plausible ways of projecting human life into possible futures. Even now, human life is already so complex and involves so many individuals and communities and so much interaction with our universe as to render implausible the simpler views of, for example, moral paths based upon simple ideas of human beings traveling through time across a Euclidean landscape. The space and time of human life and certainly of human communities interact in ways that force us to develop more complex geometries for visualizing and analyzing and describing human lives and human communal lives.
There is certainly a sense in which parts of a more general way of thought, such as a political philosophy drawn from Thomism or from Lockeanism, could be customized to the needs and desires and local beliefs of a country but something so grand as a true `philosophy’ is scaled more to the level of a civilization, the West and not even English-speaking peoples let alone England or the United States. The greater insight is that there is a level of abstraction where the human intellect, the communal mind, is the same as a civilization. The individual human minds are also somewhat the same because my mind is, so to speak, a localized and far more limited version of the communal mind of the West or at least of some civilization or phase of the West which is still in an embryonic form. (The individual also has certain freedoms of movement not available to the entire community, but I’ll not try to deal with that issue here.) So it is that an individual mind is also an encapsulation of Creation or any lesser understanding of what exists. Even the greatest communal mind we’ve yet seen, that of Western Civilization, perhaps a hundred years ago before the processes of decay intensified, was very much imperfect and incomplete. Any individual mind, even one so magnificent as that of Goethe, was far less complete than the communal mind of the West but possibly less imperfect in the sense of being more unified and coherent.
The three necessary characteristics of some very important entities, worlds and human persons and moral communities and divine Persons are unity and coherence and completeness. The entities of this sort which are yet growing and developing will be at various states with regard to these characteristics. A mortal human person, in his mind and his moral character, will promise the fulfillment of those characteristics but won’t deliver. A resurrected human person sharing the life of God will be at least well on the way to fulfillment of those characteristics, however much even a perfected and completed human person will fall short of the three divine Persons. Similar statements can be made about various scales of human communities right up to the Body of Christ.
A philosophy is a major part of a human mind, it is his understanding of created being, at the level of concrete being and at the level of abstractions. Of course, the perception and understanding of concrete and abstract being were different in ancient Athens than they were in Medieval Paris. Moreover, they are currently different on the campus of Standford University from what they are in a small town in Arkansas, and both of those understandings are far different from my worldview. This diversity is mostly good though diseased views of created being, including human nature, can grow up and can even threaten the health and sanity of an entire civilization.
A philosophy serves the `common good’ of a civilization by allowing the most unified and most coherent and most complete possible understanding of created being available to that civilization. Such a philosophy is liberal in the proper sense — open-minded and generous and true to what seems at least plausible. Such a philosophy isn’t unique. Even at the most abstract level of understanding being, there has ever been a conflict between full-blown, `essentialist’ forms of Realism (such as various forms of Platonism), moderate forms of Realism (such as Aristotelianism and Augustinianism and Thomism narrowly understood), and a form of moderate Realism which has taken a radically existentialist turn (such as Thomism as interpreted by Etienne Gilson and others including me). Fit the philosophies of Kant and Locke and Hegel and James in there as you will. The actual situation is, of course, messy and calls for another grand work of history of Western philosophy as much can be seen more clearly during or perhaps a little after the collapse of a phase of a civilization, or — equivalently — the collapse of a group of understandings of created being, the collapse of existing philosophies as men of an age lose their way in the cosmos and consequently lose the moral order in their communities and in their individual souls. We often can better understand the meanings inherent in an individual or a community after he or it is no longer with us.
I’ve made it clear that I’m on a mission to establish an understanding of created being, allowing for Christian truths and modern empirical knowledge, which will allow a great `common good’, the foundation of a new civilization or — even better — a new phase of Western Civilization. I don’t know how to define more precisely the particular `common good’ to which I work because I can’t see the future. I can’t define it even so well as Aquinas or Kant could have defined it in their different historical periods, their different times within the life of Western Civilization. I can claim that I’m working toward a philosophy for a Christian civilization, a way of viewing created being which will allow residents of that civilization, full believers more so, to live morally well-ordered lives, will allow them to plausibly achieve some sort of balance in the different aspects of a good, full human life.
There isn’t any `common good’ of a well-structured sort, not any engineered product. I speak of goods which are those of organisms and communal entities which are organic in more ways than not. Ultimately, the `common good’, at least to us Christians, is what is good for the purposes of the Body of Christ as a whole or of major organs. The `common good’ we should seek is the healthy development of a child not under our control but partly under our care, a child which will show its inclinations and talents as it grows, a child which is not to be healthy if its caregivers were to force it into a predetermined mold. Call it a communal child if you wish for we are part of that child. That insight points to various complex interactions which further emphasize the need for more complex and more complicated ways of understanding with our human lives and our communal lives.
In this light, the common good can be seen as involving practical, even material, goods. Even those sorts of goods can be impossible to plan for — How many in the early centuries of the modern era would have foreseen anything like the engineering schools so important to our material prosperity? — but what is hardest to foresee and plan for is the goods related to such matters as moral character. When it comes to those matters, we need to rely on intent as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas. Under this way of thinking, we can say we intend towards the goals of a good human life and also good communal lives, morally well-ordered lives with the proper sorts of material and cultural goods, and we can move forward towards these goals one step at a time. But those goals are actually a huge expanse of twisting and turning settings for the stories which are our lives and the stories which are those of our particular communities and even the story which is the universe seen in light of God’s purposes for it. The goal, the end towards which we target ourselves is open-ended until it’s past and we see what we have accomplished in response to, in interaction with, our environments. We understand the ways in which we truly met the `common good’ and the ways in which we failed by looking in the rear-view mirror, but we should quickly turn our eyes back to the direction in which we move.