The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

David Ohana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351110495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth.

Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity—humankind's project of self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

1 From Rousseau to Tocqueville

Janus Face of Modernity

A. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Promethean Chains

Already in his first essay, Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) (1750), Jean-Jacques Rousseau exposed the paradoxical process whereby modernity subverted the Enlightenment:

The sciences, letters, and arts […] spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery, and fashion them into what is called civilized peoples.¹

Modern man—the fettered Prometheus casting off his chains—was his own prisoner. The image of chains runs like a thread through the writings of Rousseau and reflects the snare of modern freedom.

The version of the Prometheus fable that Rousseau cites in the First Discourse is drawn from Plutarch’s “How to Profit from One’s Enemies”, an essay that accompanied Rousseau throughout his life. Unlike the versions of Aeschylus, Hesiod, and Plato, which stressed the pains of Prometheus’s knowledge that accompanied the gift of light he received, Plutarch emphasized the advantages of fire for those who know how to use it. Rousseau internalized both the lessons of Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Plato and that of Plutarch and saw the dual face of Prometheus:

Prometheus’s torch is the torch of the Sciences made to quicken great geniuses; that the Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs towards it, and wants to embrace it, represents the vulgar who, seduced by the brilliance of Letters […] that the Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the citizen of Geneva.²

This article presents a phenomenological inquiry into the eidetic structures of modernity. The method of the inquiry will be a hermeneutical and comparative study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s texts as both partly foundational and representative of the character of modernity as Promethean passion. The usage of mythological metaphors is designed to provide a nonrationalistic explanation of the phenomena—an explanation that attempts to grasp the phenomena using a form of understanding that would put modernity in a broader context than itself and would enable an essential understanding of modernity without first committing to its rationalistic variation. I examine Rousseau’s writings as characteristics of the general tendency of modernity to create human beings anew—especially using the myth of Prometheus. To conduct the following investigations, I assume the innate openness of Rousseau’s writings to contradictions that are characteristic of modernity itself and thus provide an avenue toward the essence of modernity. It is not the purpose of this article to provide a new, coherent, and satisfactory interpretation of Rousseau’s thought—on which there is plenty of excellent research elsewhere. The aim here is to provide a reading of Rousseau whose center lies outside his thought as an individual; more precisely, to illuminate the nature of modernity using mythical insights.

In his book on education, Émile, ou de l’éducation (Émile, or On Education) (1762), Rousseau developed the theme of chains in connection with the alumnus or the citizen: “To reduce him all of a sudden to a soft and sedentary life would be to imprison him, to enchain him, to keep him in a violent and constrained state”.³ And he also wrote: “All the chains of opinion are broken for me; I know only those of necessity. I learned to bear these chains from my birth, and I shall bear them until my death, for I am a man”.⁴ The conclusion Émile finally reached after going on his travels with his teacher was to:

remain what you have made me and voluntarily to add no other chain to the one nature and the laws burden me. The more I examine the work of men in their institutions, the more I see that they make themselves slaves by dint of wanting to be independent and that they use up their freedom in vain efforts to ensure it.⁵

Alluding to Plato’s analogy of the cave, Rousseau asked in his “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts”, “Are we, then, destined to die tied to the edge of the well into which truth has withdrawn?”⁶

Twelve years later, in Le contrat social (The Social Contract) (1762), Rousseau wrote one of the most striking openings in the history of political thought: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”.⁷ The distance from Rousseau’s diagnosis that the source of the evil was inequality to the revolutionary Marxist conclusion or to educational radicalism was not a long one: the workers or pupils have nothing to lose but their chains.

Rousseau can be viewed as a contemporary thinker.⁸ The tensions in his political and educational outlook are the contradictions of modernity. He was an intellectual who was contemptuous of intellectuals, who glorified sentiment in the name of reason, a thinker of the Enlightenment who despised the idea of progress. The ego and the collective clash within him; freedom and equality disturb his peace; he criticizes the arts and sciences but writes a learned article for the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He overrides the personal will of people of flesh and blood in the name of the abstract principle of the general will; the purpose of his essays was the good of the individual, yet his ideal was a small political community reflecting a social contract established through a perpetual referendum. Did Rousseau forestall a particular kind of modern intellectual: one who seeks to decipher hidden codes and tensions in the spiritual climate of his period?

It is usual to see Rousseau as the father of progressive education. In his book, Émile, or On Education, “natural education” is the heart of his educational- anthropological system. Here are some principles of Rousseau’s modern progressive education: the autonomy of childhood, an emphasis on the individual, a stage-by-stage preparation of the child and the youth for the life of society, education through nature, the use of “negative education” for educational purposes. The innovative methods he advocated established his reputation as a radical critic of bourgeois, normative, conventional education, a thinker who championed the “natural” man. But in contrast to the liberal interpretation of Émile, this educational tract can be seen as a two-way text that offers each generation a democratic education but also a totalitarian one, freedom but also servitude, individuality, but, no less, conformity.

The Rousseauist freedom is paradoxical: it is a freedom that subjugates itself to the aims and purposes of objective reason. Rousseau praises a free education, but another reading of his pedagogical essay shows that what we have before us is a model of educational conditioning. Émile’s instructor Jean-Jacques says that the person instructed can do what he or she wants but can only want what the instructor wishes him to do. Rousseau’s view of education reflects the interrelationship of the Enlightenment and modernity and the paradoxical concept of freedom in his teachings. Modern humans who seek to form their own world can form it in accordance with the principles of the Enlightenment or in opposition to them. There is an immanent gap between the ideal and the reality. In this respect, Émile is a mirror of the paradoxes of modern thought in both the political and the educational spheres.

Rousseau is a many-sided thinker who forestalled with his insights the main intellectual signposts on the intersections of modernity. Before Kant, he sought a positive correlation between reason and morality;⁹ he forestalled Hegel in the distinction between “civil society” and the state;¹⁰ he heralded Marx in seeing property as the foundation of the political order and in his desire for a universalization of freedom.¹¹ He preceded Darwin in the theory of evolution, preceded Nietzsche in perceiving the origins of good and evil in historical and philological genealogy.¹² Before Freud, he was skeptical of culture, progress and art; before existentialism, he saw the alienation in man’s desire to resemble his neighbor. He was a pioneer of the structural revolution, and it is not surprising if Claude Lévi-Strauss saw him as the anthropologist among the philosophers.¹³ Before de Tocqueville, he identified the danger in the power of public opinion, and before the Frankfurt School he perceived the “cultural industry” of industrial civilization. Before Jacques Ellul, he exposed the lethal potential of science and technology, and he preceded both the existentialists, the Frankfurt School, and the post-modernists in his criticism of the one-dimensionality of the Enlightenment and of its schematic assumptions of the inevitability of progress and the exclusivity of reason.¹⁴

It is not surprising if opposing thinkers and currents of thought have in modern times taken hold of Rousseau and refused to let him go. Kant, who regarded Rousseau as “the Newton of morality”, claimed that he cured him of the idea that the glory of the human race was its intellectual development. Rousseau liberated him from his prideful attitude toward the common citizen who had no part in this intellectual progress. Kant wrote that Rousseau taught him to respect humanity, and the only picture in his bare room was a portrait of Rousseau. Kant and Rousseau were both outstanding figures of the Enlightenment, but Rousseau sought to get away from it. He wished to transform reason à la Kant into the general will, into spontaneous knowledge, into a social contract and an educational experience. Kant learned from Rousseau that virtue is a precondition for man to be man and that the law of nature is the “world of morality”. Virtue is the human’s capacity to aspire to the ideal, to direct consciousness toward a universal objective that is simultaneously rational and moral. In the instructor’s call to his protégé Émile to “widen the law of knowledge”, there is the idea of extending the laws of nature to human morality. In this way, Kant’s categorical imperative owes a debt of antecedence to Rousseau. Rousseau, however, made the opposite impression on Nietzsche in his Twilight of the Idols:

But Rousseau—to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person—one who needed moral “dignity” to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a “return to nature”; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return?¹⁵

To Nietzsche’s question about the character of Rousseau’s “return to nature”—his famous cry—there are several different answers. Nietzsche claimed that in every act of value in art or life, there is a creative overcoming of raw nature. In rationalism, there is also an attempt to transcend the raw material, a transcendence from nature to what is beyond it, to what is no longer nature.

In 1762, the year of the publication of the Social Contract and Émile, Rousseau gave two opposite answers to the question, “What is human nature?”¹⁶ This anthropological-political curiosity about the nature of man is linked in Rousseau, as in many thinkers of his generation, with the distinction made by the Enlightenment between the “state of nature” and the “political state”. Were these actual historical states or hypothetical alternatives? Rousseau’s “natural man” in a “state of nature” does not relate to a historical human being but to a model, a criterion, a point of comparison. The figure of the “natural man” served as an inspiration to modern anthropologists, who found it a useful model for a comparative study of societies.

In Rousseauian terms, man in his wild state is not the natural man. Rousseau can admire the noble savage as a type that is uncorrupted, but he is not an ideal. Modern man cannot return to the condition of the noble savage. Rousseau’s intention was more complex than that: to transcend the ideal of man in his wild state and to educate toward the ideal of the natural man. Modern man cannot return to a primitive state, but he can look at the infancy of mankind as a model, as a kind of nonlost paradise. The question is how modern man can improve himself, and Rousseau believed this is only possible in a dialectical fashion. He can progress if he has before him the vision of the natural man: freedom and not alienation, partnership and not enslavement, direct experience and not life according to the book.

Voltaire, a contemporary of Rousseau’s and an outstanding representative of the age of modernity and enlightenment, understood Rousseau’s “return to nature” as a return to the primitive stage of humanity.¹⁷ Nietzsche was closer to the mark than Voltaire, inasmuch as he realized that Rousseau’s modernity lay in his moral ambivalence, in the fact that he was both “idealistic and degraded”. In Nietzsche’s opinion, this ambivalence also characterized the French Revolution, which gave birth to modernity:

I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its “immortality”, are of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality.¹⁸

In his Antichrist, Nietzsche listed Rousseau among the spiritual zealots: Savonarola, Luther, Robespierre, Saint Simon, the pathological foundation of whose teachings made them “the opposition-type of the strong spirit who has become free”.¹⁹ Nietzsche, like Robespierre himself, saw Rousseau as the spiritual father of Robespierre, who in the French Revolution wanted to impose a mechanical equality on all humans, to subjugate them within their state of freedom.

Marx also perceived Rousseau’s influence on Robespierre and the French revolutionaries, but his attack on Rousseau was made from the other side of the fence. In Marx’s opinion, Rousseau’s and Robespierre’s failure to relate to the dominant economic class finally left them as idealists who adhered to the principle of will. All that Rouss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 From Rousseau to Tocqueville: Janus Face of Modernity
• 2 1848: “We Are Sitting on a Volcano”
• 3 From Marx to Lenin: A Red Future
• 4 Anarchism, Nihilism, Racism
• 5 Foucault and Beyond
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index