Minding the Modern

Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge

Thomas Pfau

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780268089856
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.

A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.

Part I

PROLEGOMENA

The present is a text, and the past its interpretation.

—John Henry Newman

1

FRAMEWORKS OR TOOLS?

On the Status of Concepts in Humanistic Inquiry

This is a study of two closely related concepts—“will” and “person”—which have proven indispensable to Western humanistic inquiry and its ongoing, albeit enormously diverse, attempts to develop a satisfactory account of human agency. More implicitly, what follows is also a study of our changed relationship to concepts and, hence, to the nature, purpose, and responsibility of thinking and knowledge. The argument to be advanced hinges on a number of interlocking claims and objectives that should be sketched right away, if only in preliminary fashion. A first claim is historical in kind, albeit just as emphatically not historicist. Its purport is that, for reasons to be considered shortly, both will and person—as well as a number of other key concepts of humanistic inquiry entwined with these notions—undergo momentous and, I argue, deeply problematic change in European modernity. First, the scope of their relevancy to humanistic inquiry, as indeed that very project itself, contracts. Second, for a variety of reasons having to do with transformations internal to philosophical theology and the rise of naturalist and reductionist approaches sponsored by the emergence of a scientific culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the internal coherence of these key concepts and their centrality within humanistic (interpretive) inquiry erodes over time. Finally, given modernity’s accelerating commitment to an ostensibly value-neutral ideal of knowledge anchored in efficient causation alone, conceptions of a responsible will and a person defined by its relation to others are progressively relegated to the margins of philosophical inquiry. Along with a host of contiguous notions (e.g., judgment, responsibility, self-awareness, teleology, etc.), they ultimately succumb to a process of pervasive forgetting. As remains to be seen, such forgetting was inevitable considering the extent to which post-Hobbesian thought had lost sight of, or had rejected outright, the ancient view that both the meaning and the significance of humanistic concepts are inseparable from their complex and often agonistic history of transmission.

To approach modernity as a condition of progressive conceptual amnesia, which in turn results in an increasingly stunted outlook on human agency, undoubtedly will ruffle some feathers in what (often at its own peril) for the past thirty-five years or so has been reconstituted as the “profession” of the humanities. A first way of arguing the point would be to establish a causal connection between modernity’s diminishing grasp of concepts as dialectically evolving, hermeneutic frameworks and the professionalization of humanistic knowledge that, in David Simpson’s pointed formulation, has all but become “divorced from content” and is vaguely presumed to be “useful in itself.”1 For however one may feel about it, there can be no question that for the past four decades or so, the humanities (especially in North America) have undergone enormous change as regards their institutional cache, their methodological orientation, and, ultimately, their perceived object of inquiry. Notably, as the preoccupation with finding a “definitive” method of inquiry intensified, the identity of the object or core questions to be engaged by humanistic study seemed to grow more obscure. Post-structuralism (in its various psychoanalytic, philosophical, anthropological, or aesthetic guises), deconstruction, new historicism, cultural materialism, queer studies, post-colonialism, and the more recent incursion of neuro-scientific methodologies into the humanities are just some of the more conspicuous instances of this shift. Cumulatively these approaches reveal how a proliferation of methodologies tends to shift the object of inquiry and inflate the number of sub-specializations, while simultaneously shrinking their intellectual scope; one is left with the impression of a rather dubious mathematical procedure, something we might call multiplication-by-division. To be sure, the quest for a sharply defined method, reliable in its application and guaranteed to produce marketable results, hardly amounts to a new development; it had crucially shaped European modernity in the era of Bacon, Boyle, Gassendi, Newton, and Leibniz, and if anything its much belated arrival and euphoric reception in (American) humanistic inquiry in 1966 at the newly inaugurated Johns Hopkins Humanities Center seemed to betoken a new, heightened legitimacy for the humanities as a bona fide science.

Not considered, however, was the question, previously raised by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, as to whether a commitment to some determinate method within the humanities might not entail unwarranted and unsustainable assumptions about the kind of knowledge to be thus produced. Indeed, the proliferation of increasingly short-lived, and often adversarial methodological prescriptions since the 1960s suggests that while the emergence of “theory” had undeniably taken control of departments and schools of inquiry throughout North America, its outlook on the long durée and complex genealogies of inquiry implicitly at stake was not so much as a body of work to be diacritically engaged but as so much fossilized intellectual substance to be historicized, syllogistically disproven, or in some other fashion overcome. Simply put, the ethos underlying the practice of “theory” since the 1960s in North America has been typically one of emancipation, and as a result its approaches have been axiomatically conceived as so many methods or techniques, to be applied to various fields and objects of inquiry. Compounded by a pragmatist and anti-metaphysical stance whose long history in Anglo-American and British culture David Simpson has traced some time ago, the history of “theory” that has shaped North American academia for several decades now has largely devolved into a quest—rather in the tradition of Bacon—for an inductive and universally applicable method of reducing contingent phenomena to infinitely repeatable certitudes.2

With barely concealed irony, Paul de Man’s 1982 essay “The Resistance to Theory” thus concludes with the faintly dispiriting observation that “technically correct rhetorical readings may be boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasant, but they are irrefutable.” Modernity’s most ardent wish—the wish not to be deceived or, in de Man’s parlance, to engage written works in a way “that would stay clear of any undue phenomenalization or of any undue grammatical or performative codification of the text”—can ultimately never be granted.3 Given modernity’s conception of knowledge as a series of deductions inexorably following from our embrace of an all-encompassing methodological template, there can be no conclusive triumph of theory (or, in the present instance, a method known as “rhetorical reading”) but only an endless sequence of performative misadventures. Perhaps de Man’s sardonic reflexivity was meant as a gibe at his many followers, so doggedly intent on proselytizing his interpretive approach as a definitive method and, as Nietzsche had put it, repaying their teacher poorly by remaining forever disciples. And yet, to suppose that the professional theorist inhabits a “state of constant suspension” or “undecidability” is to vacillate between a narcissistic indifference concerning basic human questions and an incipient despair over the entire project of theoretical inquiry; for Terry Eagleton, it is the professional narcissism and blatant disregard for historical specificity that have defined postmodern theorizing (“those who are privileged enough not to need to know, for whom there is nothing politically at stake in reasonably accurate cognition, have little to lose by proclaiming the virtues of undecidability”), whereas for David Simpson “the sheer emotional and rhetorical difficulty of remaining in a state of constant suspension . . . seems to have made a place for a headlong retreat from theory and from the dissatisfactions it seems to prescribe.”4

While these criticisms are not without merit, de Man’s argument nevertheless goes to the very heart of method—viz., its speculative and seemingly deluded confidence in the eventual attainment of total certainty and impregnable authority. Even a casual reading of Bacon or Newton shows modernity’s quest for objective method to be thoroughly steeped in the spirit of utopia, its heart stirred by that quintessentially modern fantasy: the libido dominandi’s conclusive possession of all phenomena rather than letting them speak and conceiving knowledge as our adequatio to and participation in them. More recently, the proliferation of methodologies (mislabeled as “theory”) and the concurrent multiplication and division of their professed objects of inquiry have only accelerated, at least in part because of the humanities’ increasingly frantic quest for greater institutional prestige and also in consequence of their rather naïve attempt to incorporate themselves as a modern profession. While highly effective for information-based sciences, professionalism turns out to be inapposite to interpretive disciplines that require our sustained immersion in a many-layered past composed of intellectual genealogies and their often conflicting lines of transmission. Not surprisingly, the price of “professionalization” (to use a word of which college accrediting organizations, graduate school deans, and funding agencies seeking to maximize their returns are equally enamored) has been steep. Far too often, individuals working in the humanities are tempted to tailor their research projects to minor grants made available by (non-researching) career administrators keen to promote research on topics whose importance they have mimetically deduced from other administrators. The projects in question tend to be labeled (often well before their completion) as “cutting-edge,” interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary while raising doubts as to whether those pursuing them any longer enjoy a clear grasp of what constitutes disciplinarity. A particularly farcical aspect of the humanities’ “professionalization” involves the haphazard and naïve uses of instructional technology urged upon faculty by university administrators, themselves gullible captives of corporations sensibly minding their own business interests. Conceivably, a Power-Point presentation may be a sensible tool for conveying information to a panel of experts in oncology or marketing; yet one need not be a Luddite to recognize it as a wholly inapposite medium for developing and presenting a nuanced and sustained interpretive effort.

Many of these and other symptoms of what Raymond Tallis has provocatively termed “the suicide of the humanities” strongly correlate with the humanities’ prolonged bout of “science envy.”5 What Coleridge had already indicted as his contemporaries’ “asthmatic” style of thinking and writing—riveted by new information yet ill at ease with sustained reflection—is particularly evident in the current preoccupation, unparalleled in the history of humanistic inquiry, with devising forever new techniques, concepts, and methods.6 The missing link between the recent phenomenon of a fully professionalized humanities and the latter’s pervasive misapprehension of method as “theory” is modernity’s quintessentially utopian nature—its nervous or, in Coleridge’s combative phrase “finger-active, brain-lazy” (CM, 2:648), quest for anticipating and seizing the new. Concurrently, a humanistic inquiry legitimated primarily by its professional organization and methodological sophistication will naturally reenact modernity’s iconoclastic, not to say allergic reaction against the mere suggestion that to know might depend on the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues such as patience, good sense, moderation, and studiousness (rather than blind and fleeting “curiosity”)—most of which modernity had so unwisely anathemized. Overall, then, the way that the humanities have constituted themselves as an aggregate of disciplines obeying, by and large, a historicist framework and procedural ethos since the mid-nineteenth century shows them to be a specific epiphenomenon of modernity and, thus, inauspiciously positioned as regards a critical and comprehensive assessment of the modern project’s limitations and antagonisms.

Still, the objective of what follows is not to indulge in a jeremiad but, rather, to show by example that if there is to be a future for humanistic and interpretive knowledge, it will hinge less on the contrivance of yet another theory or slate of technical terms than on the sustained retrieval and critical engagement of some key concepts that (so my argument) have proven indispensable for meaningful humanistic inquiry since its beginnings in Plato and Aristotle. Inasmuch as such a retrieval is successful, it will also restore a clearer understanding of the distinctive nature and function of concepts within those disciplines committed to the cultivation of interpretive knowledge. To make that case in responsible and hopefully convincing fashion it is imperative to recognize the central and indispensable role of agency and action to any interpretive discipline. More than anything, it is the naturalist and, especially, the reductionist legacy of Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, and others that has estranged us from the abiding and unique phenomenon of human intelligence as it is realized in action—in contradistinction to a mechanistic and literally mindless notion of process or behavior. To that end, what follows will seek to recover the history of two conceptions that are always in play when questions of action and agency are being considered: those of will and person. The first sections of Part II thus trace the idea of the will (to specify it as the human will would be to commit a pleonasm) with a strong focus on its relation to the emotions, the intellect, and their respective involvement with the Platonic logos. In time, the notion of the will crystallized by absorbing and recalibrating a number of other concepts (desire, self-possession, judgment, teleology, etc.) into a complex and progressively self-aware hermeneutic tradition that dates back to ancient Greek thought, its subsequent cultivation in Stoic and neo-Platonic philosophy, and that first culminates in Augustine’s supple and profound synthesis of these traditions with the relatively new field of Christian theology. Likewise, an intellectual archeology of the idea of person in both Christian and (to a lesser extent) Jewish philosophical theology, will be undertaken in Part III, which traces Coleridge’s profound investment (unique among his contemporaries) in that tradition.

Over the course of some 1,800 years spanning from fifth-century Athens to the Dominican synthesis of Aristotelian and Augustinian thought in thirteenth-century Paris, Western philosophy and theology had gradually evolved a coherent and supple conception of human agency as embodied, capable of intellectual self-awareness, constitutively related to other rational agents, and hence incontrovertibly capable of making (and being responsible for) choices. It should go without saying that the capacity of choosing implies both a reflexive awareness of the agent invested with it,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Image
• Exordium: Modernity’s Gaze
• Part I. Prolegomena
• Part II. Rational Appetite: An Emergent Conceptual Tradition
• Part III. Progressive Amnesia: Will and the Crisis of Reason
• Part IV. Retrieving the Human: Coleridge on Will, Person, and Conscience
• Works Cited