The Vision of Richard Weaver

by Joseph Scotchie

The Vision of Richard Weaver is the first collection of essays about the seminal thinker. It examines the dual nature of human beings and the quest for civilized communities in a corrupted age that believed in the religion of science and in the "natural goodness" of man.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Joseph Scotchie is the author or editor of eight books, including The Vision of Richard Weaver, Barbarians in the Saddle, The Paleoconservatives, and Revolt from the Heartland. His work has won awards from the New York State Press Association and the North Carolina Society of Historians. A graduate of both the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the City College of New York, Scotchie has worked for three decades as a journalist in the New York City area.

Reviews

[Dave Franklin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Vision of Richard Weaver” is a collection of essays about Weaver, a language philosopher and thinker, edited by Joseph Scotchie. Various writers examine Weaver’s works about language, the dual nature of man, and the decline of the West.

In “Ideas Have Consequences,” Weaver analyzed William of Occam's nominalism, and quirkily attributed many of modernity’s woes to this 14th century thinker. Nominalism, the denial of universals, sees only particulars. As Weaver noted, nominalism results in solipsism and relativism, and leaves us without a method to measure Truth. Thus, Weaver warned, each man becomes his own "priest and ethics professor." Weaver averred that this left modern men in the condition of "moral idiots, ... incapable of distinguishing between better and worse".

Weaver was outspoken in decrying America's moral decline and its move toward a culture of materialism. A civilization that no longer believed in universals, according to Weaver, cannot comprehend Truth. The result, in Weaver's words, is a "shattered world."

Weaver's moderns have undermined the natural distinctions among individuals.The idea of equity contravenes the natural order of being. Weaver spoke of "social groupings," and warned of the corrosive acids wrought by the sin of envy. Organic structures such as family and community create duties grounded in sentiments unrelated to equity; they are essential to human flourishing.

Like Orwell, Weaver believed that language and thought are inextricably linked. As a study in rhetoric, Weaver’s “The Ethics of Rhetoric” is a must read. The ideal of persuasion informed by Truth is no longer considered a subject to be taught in American universities, where assertion has replaced argument, and violence has usurped right. A consideration of Weaver, is therefore, essential. Weaver foresaw that a society that attempts to eradicate social distinctions through semantic policing and regulation, cannot be classless. He predicted that the policing bureaucracy itself would become a ruling class.

[Zachary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know that this volume is a collection of work drawn from several decades of writing about Richard Weaver, and not a series of essays assembled specifically to go together. So, I can give a little bit of grace for some elements being repeated or restated several times throughout the varied essays. But this book really becomes defined by its repetition, to the point that it almost seems like there's actually not necessarily that much to say about Weaver's writing and thinking other than what has already been said. I've read Weaver, and find him interesting and noteworthy, but these essays make it seem like he did only a handful of things, and not even that well--another commonality is that all these essays repeatedly point out Weaver's shortcomings and failures and then try to pull something significant out of the parts of him they do see as noteworthy. Overall, the book presents a very muddled vision of its object of ostensible praise, and does more to make him and his ideas seem questionable if not outright bad than anything else.