Grant and Nietzsche-Heidegger: aus-einander-setzuni - Ron Dart

I spend a great deal of life reading Heidegger. He is the greatest philosopher of the modern era… He is, of course, an ultimately modern philosopher & if I can summon the courage I would like to write an account of why his criticism of Plato is not true.

George Grant to Peter Self, 1987

I  The Dilemma

I have had an interest in Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger for many a decade, and I have had the good fortune to spend time at Nietzsche’s home in Sils Maria in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland. I have also lingered at Heidegger’s Hut (where he brought some of his finer students) at Todtnauburg south of Freiburg (where Heidegger taught for many years) in Southern Germany. I have trekked most of the trails Nietzsche did in the mountains in the Engadine and sat where he had his epiphany of the “eternal recurrence of the identical”. I have rambled round the upland ridge above the Hut and walking path where Heidegger often walked with peers and students. I have done my best to read much of Nietzsche and Heidegger’s writings (most in English, some in German) and various commentaries on both men (given their boosters and knockers). I have also been fortunate to read most of George Grant’s published (and unpublished writers) in which he engages Nietzsche and Heidegger and ponders their appeal and limitations. This short article, for the most part, lights down on Grant’s read of Nietzsche and Heidegger and reflects why, by day’s end, he parted paths with them and viewed Plato (and Platonic Christianity) as a sounder waymark and pathfinder than Nietzsche and Heidegger’s read of Classical Greek philosophy, tragic literature and the meaning and ongoing significance of philosophy. 

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Review of Ron Dart's "North American High Tory Tradition" by Cameron Lesage

The North American High Tory Tradition (2016), by Professor Ron Dart, is an appeal to North Americans to remember an aspect of their collective history that has too often been forgotten, or misunderstood and caricatured. This book is an expansion (seemingly limited to the preface, forward, and introduction) into the American context that was only hinted at earlier in The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes (1999), The Canadian High Tory Tradition: Raids on the Unspeakable (2004), and Keepers of the Flame (2012). For it is thanks, in part, to those Loyalists who journeyed to Canada from the burgeoning republic that the Tory touch has survived.

The book itself is divided into five sections. Section I is a plea to Canadians to turn to Canadian thinkers in order to avoid colonialism. Section II is an introduction to the history of Canadian Conservatism. Section III is an introduction to George Grant and his thought. Section IV is a discussion of the Red/High Tory response to liberalism. The final section, Section V discusses the Anglican tradition in the Canadian context, its interactions with Red/High Tories and Eastern Orthodoxy, as well as Grant's engagement with Orthodoxy.

At first glance, this book seems like yet another carbon-copy re-iteration of Dart's Red/High Tory thesis. However, upon engaging the text, one finds that this is not the case. Firstly, the more literary element of High/Red Toryism (Livesay, Fiamengo, Acorn, etc.) has been left out to allow, one would assume, a more focused political and theological discussion.

Review of Ron Dart's "The North American High Tory Tradition" - by Barry K. Morris

A Review of Ron Dart’s The North American High Tory Tradition, N.Y.: American Anglican Press, 2016, 337 pages.

By Barry K. Morris, minister with the Longhouse Council of Native Ministry, Vancouver, BC (and author of Hopeful Realism in Urban Ministry, 2016)

Ron Dart’s new book is mammoth in scope and, for one relatively unfamiliar with his governoring “high-ness” theme, daunting to read.  Thankfully, his writing is clear, comprehensive, cogent, at points compassionate, cleverly polemical, and for I, (almost) consistently convincing.

One looks for some hints of familiarity, something and someone gratefully to attach to like a George Grant or a Charles Taylor. On the latter, there is a sensible and rather daring critique of an otherwise hard to dispute political philosopher; few seemed to have challenged Taylor and Dart’s constructive remarks deem Taylor to be unduly wedded to the modernity of the reigning status quo. Doubtlessly, some would quarrel with this. On Grant, there is a whole section III, dedicated to sound explications of what is Dart’s favourite Canadian political and, spiritual thinker. There are another six chapters where Grant is specifically associated and analyzed with others (Stephen Leacock being a favourite, as in 3 chapters and reminiscent of other Dart books like The Eagle and the Ox, 2006). Grant has got to be Dart’s number one nominee for the Canadian if not North American “public intellectual.” No surprise thus that the book’s last sentence ends with “… George Grant has pointed the way to … an ennobling place to live, move, and have our being” (277, cf. 160 “We are in desperate need of more George Grant in Canada at this time of distorted  understanding…May the hard work of Grant bear much counter-culture fruit in the future….”). Mind you, there is in Grant’s spirituality potentially poignant reflections on that sense of the Whole that are omitted in Dart’s book; this still yearns to be explicated [Grant hinted in English-Speaking Justice (1974) and interviews with David Cayley’s George Grant in Conversation (1995)].

George Grant and Robert Crouse: Prophetic Tories - by Ron Dart

Robert D. Crouse represents that paradigm of those catholic of scholars, whose investigations of the Christian tradition have consistently shown courageous sensitivity to its complex origins and trajectories from late antiquity to our present.  

      

- Robert Dodaro (OCA) Instituto Patristico Augustinanum Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought: Essays Presented to the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse (2007)  

             

George Grant has been called Canada’s greatest political philosopher. To this day, his work continues to stimulate, challenge, and inspire Canadians to think more deeply about matters of social justice and individual responsibility.

- Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics (2006)                                   

I. Introduction                              

There can be little doubt that George Grant (1918-1988) and Robert Crouse (1930-2011), for different reasons, were two of the most significant Canadian Anglican intellectuals of the latter half of 20^th and first decade of the 21^st century. Grant was a public intellectual in a way Crouse never was, but Crouse had a depth to him (in his many probes into the Patristic-Medieval ethos) that Grant did not. Grant challenged the ideological nature of liberal modernity at a philosophical and political level in a way Crouse never did, but Crouse, in a detailed and meticulous manner, articulated and enucleated the complex nature of the Patristic-Medieval vision in a way Grant did not. Both men were deeply concerned about the passing away of a more classical vision of the soul, church and society and both attempted to retrieve the discarded image. Crouse was much more of an Anglican churchman than Grant, but Grant engaged the larger public square in a way Crouse never did.

I have been fortunate, over the last few decades, to do in depth work on George Grant and I have many a letter from Sheila Grant (George’s wife) on life at Dalhousie-King’s (where George began and ended his academic life). I also have many a letter from Robert Crouse, many a fond memory of visits with Robert (some fine photos also) when in Nova Scotia or when Robert visited the West Coast (Robert bunked in at our home). My interest, therefore, in the Anglican life and writings of George Grant and Robert Crouse is both of some academic interest but also of a personal nature. Hopefully, this essay will embody and reflect both these approaches.     

Was PM Harper a Tory? Terry Gavin on Ron Dart and the Red Tory tradition (2006)

Editor's comment: In 2006, the Georgia Straight published an article asking if PM Stephen Harper was properly termed a Tory. The article focused on Ron Dart's insights into the 'Red Tory' tradition. The article is an interesting read as a retrospective of the Harper regime.  

Stephen Harper is no Tory

by Terry Glavin on February 2nd, 2006 at 9:00 AM

 

Milton Acorn was Canada's "people's poet". He was a founder of the Georgia Straight. There was a time when his poetry readings filled union halls across the country with adoring legions of communists, feminists, and student activists.

Stephen Leacock was the founding father of the Canadian sense of humour, but he was also the chairman of the political-science department at McGill University. His Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich was a bestseller in Moscow in the heady days following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

Just a few steps from the plot where Leacock is buried, at Sibbald Point, Ontario, is the grave of Mazo de la Roche, who was once Canada's best-loved novelist. She authored the internationally acclaimed Jalna series, which was a sort of multivolume, epic Brideshead Revisited.

Then there was Eugene Forsey, proud Newfoundlander, socialist, Rhodes scholar, and constitutional expert. He was a founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the New Democratic Party.

Apart from being dead, the thing these people have in common is that they were all Tories.

Here's another Tory: Ron Dart, a prolific, polymathic, and very-alive political-science professor at the University College of the Fraser Valley. 

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THE OWL & JADIS pt 7 & 8 - Ron Dart on George P. Grant

THE OWL & JADIS pt 7 - "George Grant: The Canadian Lewis" - with Ron Dart 

THE OWL & JADIS pt 8 - "C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald: Soul Friends" - with Ron Dart

THE OWL & JADIS pt 5 & 6 - Ron Dart on George P. Grant

THE OWL & JADIS pt 5 - Athens and Jerusalem: Beyond Dilettantism - with Ron Dart 

THE OWL & JADIS pt 6 - Grant: The Betrayal, Clearcutting and Recovery of the Ancient Ways - with Ron Dart