Modernities 3959484410, 9783959484411

Citation preview

Peter McCormick Modernities

LIBRI NIGRI

75

Edited by

Hans Rainer Sepp

Editorial Board Suzi Adams ∙ Adelaide │ Babette Babich ∙ New York │ Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray ∙ Waterloo, Ontario │ Damir Barbarić ∙ Zagreb │ Marcus Brainard ∙ London │ Martin Cajthaml ∙ Olomouc │ Mauro Carbone ∙ Lyon │ Chan Fai Cheung ∙ Hong Kong │ Cristian Ciocan ∙ Bucureşti │ Ion Copoeru ∙ Cluj-Napoca │ Renato Cristin ∙ Trieste │ Eddo Evink ∙ Groningen │ Matthias Flatscher ∙ Wien │ Dimitri Ginev ∙ Sofia │ Jean-Christophe Goddard ∙ Toulouse │ Andrzej Gniazdowski ∙ Warszawa │ Ludger Hagedorn ∙ Wien │ Seongha Hong ∙ Jeollabukdo │ Edmundo Johnson ∙ Santiago de Chile │ René Kaufmann ∙ Dresden │ Vakhtang Kebuladze ∙ Kyjiw │ Dean Komel ∙ Ljubljana │ Pavlos Kontos ∙ Patras │ Kwok-ying Lau ∙ Hong Kong │ Mette Lebech ∙ Maynooth │ Nam-In Lee ∙ Seoul │ Monika Małek ∙ Wrocław │ Balázs Mezei ∙ Budapest │ Viktor Molchanov ∙ Moskwa │ Liangkang Ni ∙ Hangzhou │ Cathrin Nielsen ∙ Frankfurt am Main │ Ashraf Noor ∙ Jerusalem │ Karel Novotný ∙ Praha │ Markus Ophälders ∙ Verona | Luis Román Rabanaque ∙ Buenos Aires │ Rosemary Rizo-Patrón de Lerner ∙ Lima │ Kiyoshi Sakai ∙ Tokyo │ Javier San Martín ∙ Madrid │ Alexander Schnell ∙ Paris │ Marcia Schuback ∙ Stockholm │ Agustín Serrano de Haro ∙ Madrid │ Tatiana Shchyttsova ∙ Vilnius │ Olga Shparaga ∙ Minsk │ Michael Staudigl ∙ Wien │ Georg Stenger ∙ Wien │ Silvia Stoller ∙ Wien │ Ananta Sukla ∙ Cuttack │ Toru Tani ∙ Kyoto │ Detlef Thiel ∙ Wiesbaden │ Lubica Ucnik ∙ Perth │ Pol Vandevelde ∙ Milwaukee │ Chung-chi Yu ∙ Kaohsiung │ Antonio Zirion ∙ México City – Morelia.

The libri nigri series is edited at the Central-European Institute of Philosophy, Prague. www.sif-praha.cz

Peter McCormick

Modernities Histories, Beliefs, and Values

Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie. Detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet abrufbar über http://dnb.ddb.de

This book is a result of the project “Providence and morality” (No. IGA_CMTF_2019_001) supported by the Palacký University Olomouc.

Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH D-99734 Nordhausen 2020 Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier Alle Rechte vorbehalten Printed in Germany

ISBN 978-3-95948-441-1

For Helen and Timothy Tackett

1

2

Contents Contents.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Preface.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Part One: Histories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Essay I: Modernities and Histories.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Explanatory and Interpretive Accounts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Descartes versus Plato, Augustine, and Montaigne.. . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Two Modernities: Descartes and Montaigne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 The Disputed Origins of Modernity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Frames of Our Histories and Modernities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Envoi: The Remaining Tension.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Essay II: Internationalizing Law.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Individual Autonomy and the Community of Values.. . . . . . . . . . 24 The Task of Peace Today.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Limitations and the Capacities of the Individual. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Contingency and Individual Autonomy.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Envoi: The Reflexive Triad.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Essay III: Education and Nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Living According to Nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Nature as the Observable Universe.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Nature as the Human Milieu.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Nature as Human Nature.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Envoi: The Nature in Nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

3

Contents

Part Two: Beliefs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Essay IV: Modernities and Beliefs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Subjectivation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 From Procedural to Instrumental Rationality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Modern Origins of the Transformation of the Self. . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Lockean Belief and Substantive Reason. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Substantive Reason and the Obligations of Belief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Rationality and Interpretation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Envoi: Reason, Belief, and Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Essay V: Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Analyzing Beauty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Disinterestedness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Aesthetic Attitude, Taste, and Beauty.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Appearance, Reality, and Natural Continua. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Modernity’s Realist Backgrounds and the Aesthetic. . . . . . . . . . . 94 Envoi: Realism After Modernity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Essay VI: Bolzano’s Realisms.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Kant and the Subjectivisation of Aesthetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bolzano and the Theory of the Beautiful. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elucidating Bolzano’s Views. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appraising Bolzano’s Aesthetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Critical Questions.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Envoi: Towards Realistic Phenomenologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

viii

102 108 111 117 122 126 128



Contents

Part Three: Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Essay VII: Modernities and Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Moral Sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Frameworks.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Identities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Articulacy.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Best Account Principle.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Envoi: Stepping Back.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

136 141 142 147 148 154 155

Essay VIII: Cultural and Religious Identities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Cultural and Religious Questions Now?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Difficulties With Talk of Identity Today. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disambiguating Talk of Identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reformulating the Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Envoi: Fresh Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

158 158 159 160 162 163

Essay IX: Personal Sovereignties. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Realists and Legalists.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Persons Are.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who Persons Are. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Persons as Essentially Sovereign.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Envoi: Contingencies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Endnotes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

166 169 171 172 174 175

ix

6

Preface Modernities: Histories, Beliefs, and Values, and its companion volume in the same distinguished series, Solicitations: Poverties, Discourses, and Limits, ap‑ pear in especially challenging times. Europe, many informed persons keep saying, is once again in crisis. But exactly what the crisis is few seem able to say. When the “crisis” cannot be stated clearly, the “crisis” is certainly critical. On the one hand, so many geo­‑political, economic, political, financial, social, and cultural problems appear to be proliferating endlessly. Yet at the same time so many thoughtful persons continue to narrow their perspectives to almost single issue concerns. Good examples of both overly broad and overly narrow approaches include ongoing discussions at many levels concerning accelerating climate change, worsening migration issues, and even increasingly widespread fears of coming tactical if not strategic nuclear warfare. Moreover, working seriously in sustained ways to find reasonable and efficient middle ground approaches between multifarious and mono­‑causal reflections on current European crises often simply falls between the two poles instead of actually bridging them fruitfully. The main effort here is certainly not a matter of bridging. Rather the attempt is to inquire more particularly into some of the major philosophical and cultural grounds underlying so much general and specialized talk today of Europe’s new crises. Accordingly, several basic headings stand out. Just three are selected here – alternative early modern histories of European post­ ‑modern cultures today, contrasting readings of just how knowledge and be‑ lief are to be understood fundamentally, and rationally competitive visions of basic human values. One general supposition throughout is that recurring European crises today continue to arise in part not just out of contemporary problems only but out of deeply sedimented confusions about quite fundamental matters. In other words, were someone to try to state the nature of the present Europe‑ an “crisis” clearly, perhaps someone could not improperly say something like the following. Underlying the insistent crises of Europe today is a deepening confusion about the fundamental sense and significance of history, beliefs, and values grounding European cultures.

ix

Preface

Indeed, this seems to be repeatedly the case. That is, this is the case whether the pragmatic problems at issue are, for example, the struggles over renewing the legal articulations of the EU in the wake of any eventual Brexit Treaty and the USA’s new isolationism, or the harmonizing of EU immigra‑ tion and asylum policies in the face of increasingly more successful populist political movements, or the urgent reconfigurations of the EU financial and military commitments to Nato’s outdated mission statements in response to the thorough­‑going modernization of Russia’s entire military forces and its annexation of Crimea and separation of the two easternmost provinces of Ukraine. Accordingly, the basic perspective here might not unfairly be summa‑ rized as historical, epistemological, and axiological. The historical axis turns on the different echoes of Europe’s multiple modernities in contemporary international legal theory as well as in education. The epistemological axis runs through early modernities to the particular cases of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics and nineteenth­‑century philosophy of language and of art. And the axiological axis cuts diagonally across basic issues in competing ideas of the good, kinds of identity both religious and cultural, and the metaphysical inde‑ pendence of the person. Confusions about all three dimensions, I believe, whether each is tak‑ en by itself or in one combination or another with the other two, require fresh reflection. Such fresh reflection is required if Europe’s “crises” are to be understood well enough to accommodate better and more durable solutions than at present. As each of the essays will demonstrate, my debts are very many. In par‑ ticular, however, I would single out the continuing support of Hans Rainer Sepp who has so encouragingly welcomed this book and its companion into his wide ranging book series, Libri nigri, and the very strong support of Dean Vit Husek in Olomouc who has repeatedly sought out and found the nec‑ essary funding for professional publication. I also would like to point out once again the persistently stimulating philosophical atmosphere of regular meetings with friends in Lviv, Ukraine, in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and in Cracow, Poland. Above all, I am very much indebted in many ways to ongoing sus‑ tained conversations with my long standing friends and colleagues, Volody‑ myr Turchynovskyy from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Martin

xii



Preface

Cajthaml from the Palacky University in Olomouc, and to Czeslaw Porebski from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow Poland. My greatest debt, however, is to my spouse and family. Peter McCormick Paris, 6 January 2019

xiii

xii

Part One:

HISTORIES

1

2

Essay I: Modernities and Histories1 “… one has to understand people’s self-interpreta‑ tions and their visions of the good, if one is to explain how they arise; but the second task can’t be collapsed into the first, even as the first can’t be elided in favour of the second.” – Charles Taylor 2 “In the 1580s and ‘90s, sceptical acceptance of ambi‑ guity and a readiness to live with uncertainty were still viable intellectual policies: by 1640, this was no longer the case. Intellectual options opened up by Erasmus and Rabelais, Montaigne and Bacon, were set aside …” – Stephen Toulmin3

If the most important consequences of modernity in our own times today are to be properly grasped, some distinguished intellectual historians and philoso‑ phers have insisted, several different readings of early modern history need to be understood critically. An excellent starting point for reviewing such read‑ ings is the many faceted work of the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, especially his Sources of the Self .4 Although later on I will be returning to other aspects of Taylor’s work in Part Two and Part Three of these essays, here at the outset of Part One assem‑ bling some reminders about his complex goals in his story of the sources of the self proves fruitful for understanding modernity and its histories. Taylor’s first goal is to provide “a history of the modern identity.”5 Such a history he thinks must comprise formulations of “the ensemble of (largely unarticulated) understandings of what it is to be a human agent” in view of showing “how the ideals and interdicts of this identity … shape our philosophical thoughts» (ix).

3

Essay I

His second goal is to use this story of the modern identity as “the start‑ ing point for a renewed understanding of modernity.” Modernity Taylor takes here as “the momentous transformations of our culture and society over the last three or four centuries and getting these somehow in focus” (ix). In sum, Taylor aims to provide both a thematic story of human agency and an histori‑ cal account of how this story has developed. Critically appreciating that story, however, involves understanding how that story has developed.6 My plan is to look at this development by gradually narrowing the focus from the overall sketch of Taylor’s story to what I will ar‑ gue is the story’s turning point. That turning point Taylor takes as the origins of modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the central elements of that turning point once in view, I will then turn to a recent alternative account of the origins of modernity, Steven Toul‑ min’s influential discussions in his book, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity.6 In comparing and contrasting Taylor’s story with Toulmin’s we will then be in a position to investigate just how much Taylor’s story of the modern identity actually supports his twofold goal.

Explanatory and Interpretive Accounts Taylor is quick to deny that his story makes any explicit claims to pass as an historical explanation. Stressing the very many important topics he excludes, Taylor claims only to be “dwelling on certain developments in philosophical and religious outlook, with an odd glance at aspects of popular mentality” (199). Significantly, as it will turn out later, one of the extensive developments Taylor excludes from detailed consideration is Renaissance humanist views which he chooses to mention only in passing. Among them are views on human dignity in Pico’s Oration, or those on human agency in Nicholas of Cusa where agency is a completion of the creative work of God, or the hermetic and magical background in Dee and Paracelsus for Bacon’s revolutionary work, or the explorations of Alberti and Vasari in the visual arts and their expansion on the understanding of human creative powers themselves, or even Florentine neo­‑Platonism in Michelange‑ lo’s and Leonardo’s contrasting understandings of just what “nature” art is to imitate and from just what perspectives (cf. 199–202). Part of what he is trying to do, Taylor concedes, works against any attempt at historical comprehen‑ siveness. Still, this seems a bit much to pass over lightly. Taylor thinks that his story is not to be taken as an historical explanation because he is not asking “what brought the modern identity about,” a ques‑

4



Modernities and Histories

tion that focuses on diachronic causation. Rather, he calls his question “an interpretive one” (203). This question goes: “in what consists the appeal, the spiritual power, the ‘idées­‑forces’ of the modern identity however it was brought to be in history” (203)? The historical and interpretive questions, to be sure, are closely related; but they are also distinct questions. For each requires a related but different kind of answer, the first in terms of causal explanation and the second in those of interpretive understanding. And Taylor’s interpretive question is centred on where the force of certain issues is to be found. One consequence of raising interpretive rather than explanatory ques‑ tions about the modern identity, Taylor thinks, is his being able to offer an incomplete account only. He claims however that the incompletion is un‑ avoidable. For no interpretive investigation by its nature can do full justice to the endless complexity of understanding both the material contents and the human motivation that make up the precipitating conditions of such cen‑ tral Western phenomena as the emergence of the modern identity. As Taylor writes, “one has to understand people’s selfinterpretations and their visions of the good, if one is to explain how they arise; but the second task can’t be collapsed into the first, even as the first can’t be elided in favour of the sec‑ ond” (204). With these precisions in place, Taylor then moves quickly to formulate in interpretive rather than in explanatory terms his basic thesis about the emergence of the modern identity. “The modern identity arose,” he writes, “because changes in the self­‑understandings connected with a wide­‑range of practices … converged and reinforced each other to produce it … ” (206). Consequently, Taylor’s concern in developing his story is not to address the direction of causal arrows between “idéesforces” and practices at any one mo‑ ment in history. Rather, he proposes to sketch the various facets in the devel‑ opment of the modern identity in terms of the “idées force” themselves. If these are the major lines in Taylor’s own view of just what kind of story he is telling, an interpretive rather than an explanatory one, what then are the major phases in this story? These phases comprise three overlapping historical periods. The first phase stretches, Taylor says, from “Augustine to Descartes and Montaigne, and on to our own day” (x). Here he wants to stress the first of the three elements he conjectures as central ingredients in the modern iden‑ tity, “modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths” (x). The second phase overlaps the first. It stretches from “the Reformation through the Enlightenment to its contemporary forms.” The stress here falls

5

Essay I

on “the affirmation of ordinary life.” And the final phase stretches from “the late 18th century through the transformations of the 19th century, and on to its manifestations in 20th century literature.” This final phase accents the third ingredient of the modern identity, “the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source” (x). Taylor treats the first phase under the heading, “Inwardness,” the second under that of “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,” and the last as under the headings, “The Voice of Nature” and “Subtler Languages.” The full story – and it is both very long and still both a “prelude” to later works – Taylor puts under the guiding adage “understanding modernity is an exercise in retrieval” (xi).7 Consider the first phase only of this story and indeed just that part of it that deals with the emergence of the modern identity in early modern times from Descartes to Locke. We need first a brief sketch of the trajectory Taylor follows in his account of the first phase, then a brief inventory of the salient features in the move from Descartes to Locke, and finally a sharper focus on just what the major claims about this movement really are.

Descartes versus Plato, Augustine, and Montaigne In discussing the first phase in the emergence of modern identity, the new focus on inwardness, Taylor ranges in a series of eight chapters from Plato to Augustine, to Descartes and Locke. He then returns to Montaigne and finally summarizes this part of his story around several key points. The culmination of this long discussion is his claim that the modern identity emerges by the end of the 18th century as a conjunction of three key elements of inwardness – forms of self exploration, forms of self control, and “the individualism of personal commitment” (185). Together, these three elements make up a first sketch of the modern iden‑ tity as a “three sided individualism.” These three sides include a characteristic localisation for self exploration in the inward individual, an instrumental form of moral atomism in the understanding of self control through the protec‑ tions of subjective rights, and a productive economic sense of individualism as a “new centrality of constructed orders and artefacts in mental and moral life” (197). Although this three­‑sided individualism emerges at the end of a sweep‑ ing view of western intellectual history from Plato to Locke, one of the most important strands in this story concerns the Cartesian transformation of the Augustinian tradition of radical reflexivity and inwardness. This strand more‑

6



Modernities and Histories

over is carefully intertwined with a related but different one, namely a sec‑ ond version of internalization or radical reflexivity that we find in Montaigne. Thus for Taylor the critical opposition is between Cartesian disengagement of an inner subject and Montaigne’s exploration of an inner self. Each of these two strands of early modern thought suggests a fresh un‑ derstanding of human agency in terms of differing accents on inwardness. The first strand suggests the Cartesian relocation of moral sources and under‑ standing of the good in a disengaged subjectivity duly objectified for analysis. And the second strand suggests a counterbalancing humanist insistence on exploring a self without insisting on its objectification. Before considering a contrasting view, we should look at this opposition more closely. By contrast with both Pagan and Christian antiquity, with Plato and Au‑ gustine, Taylor sees Descartes as elaborating what he calls a “new conception of inwardness, an inwardness of self­‑sufficiency, of autonomous powers of ordering by reason. . . .” (158). In short, Descartes both disengages the subject and proceduralizes reason. The result is that traditional moral sources are no longer located outside the subject, for example in the Ideas or in the will of God; they are now located within the subject. With respect to Plato, Descartes substitutes a completely different under‑ standing of self­‑exploration based on Galileo’s new “resolutive­‑ compositive” method rather than on any theological inquiries informed by metaphysical theories of “logos.” The result of this change in scientific theorizing is a cor‑ responding change in how human beings are to be understood. Once the key to scientific exploration is seen to lie outside any appeals to a theory of ideas, the moral ground these ideas supported also has to be located elsewhere. Thus just as correct scientific knowledge of things now must involve the inner representation of such things, so moral knowledge requires a similar inner representation. Taylor’s point sems to be that in both cases this inward representation is neither an imitation nor a participation but a construction. Consequently, the order of things “migrates” from outside to inside. The or‑ der of things becomes an order of representation that finally generates not just knowledge but certainty as well. Thinking becomes a gathering, a collecting, a “cogitare” (cf. 14345) whose standards derive not from the world but from the thinking subject. These standards require that the body as well as the material world be understood as entirely distinct from the subject. The result is that the subject itself is no lon‑ ger properly understood as disengaged from the world and its objectifications. In short, a different epistemology leads to a different metaphysics, and the different metaphysics results in a different philosophical anthropology or

7

Essay I

philosophy of mind. In particular, “self mastery [now] consists in our lives being shaped by the orders that our reasoning capacity constructs according to the appropriate standards” (147). When we turn from Plato to Augustine, we find that Descartes substi‑ tutes a new understanding of insight, one no longer dependent on a transfor‑ mation of the will that finally allows insight into the good, but one grounded in the realm of independent mental substance. Unlike the Stoic doctrines that Augustine revised in large measure, Des‑ cartes’s doctrines exclude the possibility of taking the cosmos as embodying a meaningful order in such a way that ethics could continue to be founded on a subjectivized physics. The world rather is a mute and meaningless mecha‑ nism to be grasped “functionally as a domain of possible ends . . . . a domain of potential instrumental control” (149). Rational self mastery requires insight, but insight is directed to the realm of mind and no longer to the realm of matter. This fresh understanding of insight in terms of the mental only leads also to a new view of the passions. Unlike the Stoics and their later baptizers who saw the passions as instances of opinion, Descartes views the passions func‑ tionally. The passions are devices that “help preserve the body­‑soul substan‑ tial union” (150), that help preserve the organism from danger by triggering certain reflexes. Accordingly, rational self mastery means keeping the passions subordinated to the instrumental control of reason. Acting efficaciously thus is engaging oneself through the instrumentality of the passions, but engaging oneself in a detached way from the perspective of inwardness as rational self­ ‑control. “The new definition of the mastery of reason brings about an inter‑ nalization of moral sources,” Taylor writes. “When the hegemony of reason comes to be understood as rational control, the power to objectify body, world, and passions, that is, to assume a thor‑ oughly instrumental stand towards them, then the sources of moral strength can no longer be seen outside us in the traditional mode… [And] if rational control is a matter of mind dominating a disenchanted world of matter, then the sense of a good life, and the inspiration to attain it, must come from the agent’s sense of his own dignity as a rational being” (1512).

Descartes thus displaces temperance as the heart of the moral vision with that great­‑souled generosity that arises from human dignity (cf. 154–5). And ra‑ tionality itself he now takes to consist not in a vision of an external reality but in certain properties of internal thinking. “Rationality,” Taylor writes, “is no longer defined substantively, in terms of the order of being, but rather proce‑

8



Modernities and Histories

durally, in terms of the standards by which we construct orders in science and life” (156). Descartes thus moves “from substance to procedure, from found to constructed orders . . . .” (156). If these are the major elements in Taylor’s view of Descartes’s role in shaping the characteristic inwardness of the modern identity, what are the somewhat different roles that Montaigne plays in this story? Just as in the case of Descartes so in that of Montaigne, Taylor devotes an entire chapter to this second perspective on “radical reflexivity” (178), a perspective on an explorative self rather than on a disengaged subject. What Montaigne discovers in his inner explorations, far from a stable hu‑ man nature, is a continuously shifting subjective terrain, what Taylor calls “a terrifying inner instability” (178). This discovery results in a different under‑ standing of reason in terms of limits, impermanence, mutability, and contin‑ gency. And it results as well in a model of self­‑description no longer in terms of “the exemplary, the universal, or the edifying, but [one that] simply follows the contours of the changing reality of one being, himself ” (179). This perspective on reason and self­‑description also leads to a new under‑ standing of nature. Nature becomes once again, as in antiquity but now for different reasons, the salutary guide for right action, for living well. Following the precepts of nature protects the individual, as Montaigne understands the matter, from the excesses of both philosophical abstraction and moral rigor‑ ism. The explorations of the self in view of greater self­‑knowledge leads to the recognition of unsuspected limits that undermines any intellectual or moral perfectionism and reinforces the moderate demands of one’s shifting, natural self. Inner explorations of the self are to be at the service of one’s individual being and not at that of some universal human being (181). Montaigne then, “inaugurates a new kind of reflection which is intensely individual, self­‑exploration, the aim of which is to reach self­‑knowledge by coming to see through the screens of self­‑delusion which passion or spiritual pride has erected. It is entirely a first person study, receiving little help from the deliverances of third person observation, and none from ‘science’” (181). Taylor draws a contrast between Descartes and Montaigne in terms of their differing aims and methods. Montaigne’s aim is sharply focused on the self as a unique individual, whereas Descartes’s aim is directed to the subject as a general substance or essence. Further, Montaigne’s method is “first­‑person self­‑interpretation,” whereas Descartes’s involves the “proof of impersonal reasoning” (182).

9

Essay I

Moreover, Descartes insists on universalizing the standards to which any individual ought to appeal in constructing his or her subjectivity, whereas Montaigne wants to insist on the irreducible originality of that inwardness each self constructs. Montaigne characteristically tries “not to find an intel‑ lectual order by which things in general can be surveyed, but rather to find the modes of expression which will allow the particular not to be overlooked” (182). So, Taylor opposes a deeper engagement with particularity in Mon‑ taigne to a deeper disengagement in Descartes. One striking addition to this contrast lies in the social dimension. For we always need to remember the deeply inter­‑personal motivation of Montaigne’s turn inwards, the death of his friend, La Boétie. “He alone partook of my true image,” writes Montaigne, “and carried if off with him. That is why I so cu‑ riously decipher myself ” (cited, 183). Thus, the context of self­‑explanation for Montaigne is friendship, whereas the context of the construction of the subject for Descartes is scientific community. This context helps clarifies just why the exploration of the self in Mon‑ taigne leads finally to no one thing such as Descartes’s substantial subject. Rather, Montaigne’s explorations continually arrive at questions about what an individual person most essentially is once we have acquiesced to the muta‑ bility of nature itself.

Two Modernities – Descartes and Montaigne This story of the first phase in the constitution of the modern identity, with its key moment in the early modern period when the Pagan and Christian vision of reason and the moral realm was displaced through the articulation of a disengaged subject in Descartes and an engaged exploratory self in Mon‑ taigne, is however one version only of the origins of modernity.8 Before we can reflect more carefully then on the connections between Taylor’s historical and philosophical goals and his story of the emergence of the modern identity, we do well to consider at least one plausible alternative. In Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity,9 Stephen Toulmin in‑ vestigates the relations between Descartes and Montaigne from the stand‑ point of a preoccupation with modernity which he shares with Taylor. But, unlike Taylor, Toulmin reads the relation between these two thinkers in very different terms. For Toulmin, the modern identity emerges as the result of two turning points and not one. The first is the humanistic discoveries of Montaigne and Bacon, and the second the scientific discoveries of Descartes and Galileo.

10



Modernities and Histories

These revolutions are separated by about 50 years or two generations, the 1570s and 1580s on the one hand, and the 1630s and 1640s on the other. The movement between these two moments is roughly the movement from renaissance humanism to 17th century rationalism. Moreover, the historical circumstances separating the two moments are those of a Europe convulsed in political, religious, and economic turmoil. The result of this movement is the thorough going turn to scientific rationalism in the interests of stabilizing the intellectual currents of the times with all the reassurances of objective standards, non­‑theoretical demonstrations, and natural ideals. The renaissance humanistic discoveries with their insistence on limita‑ tion, uncertainty, mutability, relativism, and contingency disappear from the centre of the crowded European stage to remain in the wings for several cen‑ turies. Then the use of logical rigor and moral purity are once again challenged in the work of such masters of suspicion as Marx and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud. In short, the need for certainty in so many fields of human activity suppresses the renaissance discoveries of utterly pervasive uncertainty – the clarities of logic triumph over the ambiguities of rhetoric, and the uses of an abstract rigor displace an always hesitant, tolerant, sceptical form of inquiry. As Toulmin writes: “In the 1580s and ‘90s, sceptical acceptance of am‑ biguity and a readiness to live with uncertainty were still viable intellectual policies: by 1640, this was no longer the case. Intellectual options opened up by Erasmus and Rabelais, Montaigne and Bacon, were set aside… ” (44). Ac‑ cordingly, if Montaigne’s work ushered in a renaissance in the understanding of modernity, Descartes’s work has to be seen as a counter­‑renaissance. We will find it useful to look in more detail at Toulmin’s account if we are to contrast it effectively with Taylor’s. Before looking at his treatment of Descartes and Montaigne however we need to notice the interesting and dis‑ tinctive strategy Toulmin uses to establish a context for his later discussions. This context comprises a description of a standard account of the origins of modernity, the isolation of its controlling assumptions, the critique of these assumptions, and the proposal of a revised account. “Modernity” itself is a tendentious term that still accomodates a number of competing interpretations. One central issue is just when we might date the origins of modernity. Answering this question depends very largely on one’s interests. For those with mainly political interests modernity begins with the emer‑ gence of the nation­‑state in the mid to late 17th century. Those with mainly economic interests on the other hand see modernity beginning a century lat‑

11

Essay I

er with the onset of the industrial revolution in England. Modernity begins roughly at the same time for those like Habermas who have strong sociologi‑ cal interests, specifically with Kant’s articulation of the Enlightenment ideals of ethics and politics around the time of the French and American revolu‑ tions. But for others who stress the primacy of science in the modern era the origins of modernity lie in the work of Newton in the 1630’s. Toulmin thinks we need to reach back to the 1630’s and to the work of Galileo and Descartes that first fixed the modern understanding of scientific theories as “rational” under a certain interpretation. A generation later this in‑ terpretation was generalized to the political realm. Thus, when Toulmin talks about “the standard account of modernity,” he is referring to the origins of modernity in the 1630s and 1640s. The basis of his claim to take this interpretation as standard is his con‑ viction that, despite extensive disagreements over detail, this interpretation enjoys the support of historical consensus. “Most scholars,” Toulmin writes, “agree on the point. The ‘modern’ commitment to rationality in human affairs was a product of those intellectual changes in the mid­‑17th century whose protagonists were Galileo in physics and astronomy, and René Descartes in mathematics and epistemology” (12). This consensus however has taken a new form today by comparison with the period before the Second World War that saw the consolidation of what Toulmin wants to call the standard view. The standard view, as Toulmin construes it, comprises three basic as‑ sumption which historians over the last thirty years have been busy revising. The first element of the standard view of modernity is that “the politi‑ cal, economic, social, and intellectual conditions of Western Europe radically improved from 1600, in ways that encouraged the development of new polit‑ ical institutions, and more rational methods of inquiry” (16). The idea here was that a conjunction of circumstances – trade, city growth, printing, etc. – brought about the emergence of a secular culture. This secular culture flow‑ ered in a scientific and methodological revolution marked by the appearance in the 1630s of Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Principal World Sys‑ tems and Descartes’s Discourse on Method. The second element in the standard account was the belief that “after 1600, the yoke of religion was lighter than before” (16), “that ecclesiastical constraints and controls were relaxed in the 17th century” (18). Here the key notion was the decay of the Holy Roman Empire and the growing power of an educated laity to turn aside from the dogmatism and authoritarianism of

12



Modernities and Histories

the medieval church and to think through religious matters increasingly for themselves. The third element was the belief that the genuine innovations in 17th­ ‑century science and philosophy were both revolutionary and emancipatory. And once again the main idea here is the power of Cartesian ideas of rational‑ ity to emancipate themselves from theology and to rearticulate experience in terms of a new kind of inquiry whose demonstrations from clear and distinct ideas were as accessible as the elements of Euclid’s geometry. But historical inquiry has challenged successfully each of these three con‑ trolling elements in the standard view of the origins of modernity. To the first belief about the radical improvement of European life in the early 1600s historians have opposed a body of materials that document re‑ curring crises in Europe between 1605 and 1650. The second view about the presumed lightening of theological constraints in these years historians have contested on the grounds of the very great tightening of orthodoxy between 1620 and 1660 when the Protestant­‑Catholic conflicts envenomed the Thirty Years War from 1618–1648. Finally, historians have also challenged the third element in the standard account of the origins of modernity. Far then from being the innovatory and emancipatory revolutionary movements they have seemed to be, the break‑ throughs of 17th­‑century science and philosophy now seem “to look less like revolutionary advances, and more like defensive counter­‑revolution” (17). Thus, recent historical research can be seen to have effectively under‑ mined the plausibility of the standard account of modernity’s origins that still holds sway, if not among historians at least among many historians of philos‑ ophy, perhaps even with Taylor. Note that the third element here is particularly troublesome. For, as we have seen in Taylor’s discussion of Descartes, the idea that the new scienc‑ es developed a new understanding of rationality seems seriously deficient. Toulmin argues in fact that this belief is doubly mistaken. Unlike Aristotle’s concern for the rational analysis of both theory and practice, 17th­‑century thinkers narrowed the scope of rational analysis to “the theoretical arguments that achieve a quasigeometrical certainty or necessity” (20). Further, these thinkers – Newton and Boyle are examples – far from lib‑ erating rational analysis from the constraints of theological concerns, con‑ tinued to frame projects with an eye fixed almost continually on theological matters. Thus, the standard account mistakenly insists on a thorough­‑going de­‑contexualization of reason which, while admittedly a goal of the 17th cen‑ tury thinkers, was more honoured in the breech than actually sought after.

13

Essay I

With these descriptions of modernity in mind and especially with the elements of a newly controversial standard account of the origins of moder‑ nity in mind, consider briefly then the four major components in the revised account that Toulmin wants to advocate. Each of these components, in Toul‑ min’s view, were characteristic of the earlier revolution of renaissance human‑ ism to be found in such writers as Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Bacon.Each, however, was shunted aside as a consequence of the scien‑ tific revolution two generations later on view not only in Galileo, Pascal, and Descartes but also in Bunyon, Racine, Donne, and Thomas Browne. The turn was, in summary, from four kinds of practical knowledge to four kinds of the‑ oretical knowledge – from the oral, particular, local, and timely to the written, universal, general, and timeless. In the first shift away from the oral to the written, the scientific philoso‑ phers, as Plato did with the Sophists, narrowed the broad field of argumenta‑ tion to that of logic only. Rhetoric was set aside. The soundness and validity of written arguments displaced the form, persuasiveness, and rational merit of oral argumentation, “the circumstantial merits and defects of persuasive utterances” (31). The second shift affected scope. Once again, as in the celebrated Provin‑ cial Letters of Pascal, 17th­‑century scientific philosophers effectively discred‑ ited the entire Aristotelian tradition of case studies that focused on particular circumstances. Instead, they championed against the so­‑called casuistry of their opponents the need for general abstract moral theory that one finds, for example, in the Cambridge Platonists. Moral philosophy was to dispense with case ethics once and for all and to devote itself to the formulation of general ethical principles only. Similarly, the scientific philosophers successfully resisted the extraordi‑ nary explorations the humanists had undertaken into the local concerns of “ethnography, geography, and history” (32). Descartes, we remember, could congratulate himself in the Discourse for having gone beyond his earlier in‑ terests in history. “When modern philosophers discussed ethnography and history as irrelevant to truly ‘philosophical’ inquiry,” Toulmin writes, they ex‑ cluded from their enterprise “whole realms of questions that had previously been recognized as legitimate topics of inquiry. From then on abstract axioms were in, concrete history was out” (33). Besides stressing the oral, particular, and local, renaissance humanists stressed as well the timely problems and issues of “legal, medical, or con‑ fessional practice” (33). Timeliness here refers to the rationality of effecting certain actions within a particular temporal framework such as a mariner’s de‑

14



Modernities and Histories

cision to alter course as opposed to his actual computations. The importance of the transient was caught in the humanist interest in jurisprudence as the ideal for a rational enterprise rather than in science. By contrast, the scientific philosophers would subordinate “the signifi‑ cance of local diversity, the relevance of particularity, and the rhetorical power of oral reasoning” to their formal projects for “a universal natural philosophy” (34). Such projects had no room for the transitory, only for the permanent. In short, the scientific revolution shifted intellectual attention away from the revival of the traditional challenges of practical philosophical concerns in the work of the renaissance humanists to the new challenges of theoretical philosophical concerns with formal issues. Now, if this is the gist of the revised account of the origin of modernity that Toulmin would have us substitute for the standard account, how specif‑ ically does he understand the opposition Taylor describes in detail, the con‑ trast between Descartes and Montaigne? We need to notice immediately that Toulmin, unlike Taylor, places these figure in the careful chronological order of a humanist versus a rationalist in‑ tellectual movement, whereas Taylor prefers to juxtapose their respective em‑ phases on different kinds of inwardness. As for the Montaigne of the 1570s and 1580s, the Montaigne of the Apologie and the Essais, Toulmin stresses as we would now expect the particularities of his “personal style and ideas,” the unending detail of the topics he explores, the peculiarities of his attitudes. Interestingly, Toulmin also stresses the contrast between the different roles religion plays in Augustine’s Confessions and in Montaigne’s Essais. In the first, religion is at the centre of the works, whereas in the second it is but one of many centres. The tone of this work Toulmin takes as “cool and nonjudgmental” (37) as befits the insistence on intellectual modesty in the face of sceptical concerns and the repeated experiences of the limitations of experience. Montaigne is also striking in his insistence on the privileged relation be‑ tween soul and body whereby each must aid the other. By contrast, Toulmin sees Descartes’s separation of the soul from the body as just one element in a much larger circumscription and ultimate constriction of the mental. We have no responsibility for passions and feelings because these events merely happen to persons rather than result from persons’ doings. Further, the naturalness of Montaigne’s attitudes towards embodiment, and especially towards sexuality, is lost in Descartes’s apparent overriding concerns for respectability, propriety, and socially acceptable conduct. As Toulmin observes: “By the 1640s, the rationalists do not just limit rational‑

15

Essay I

ity to the senses and the intellect… they also reflect the first inroads of the ‹respectability› that was so influential over the next two­‑and­‑ahalf centuries” (410). Rationality and logic for Descartes are to be held strictly separate from rhetoric and the emotions. Toulmin wants to contrast especially the different kinds of individualism to be found in Montaigne and Descartes. In the latter he claims to find “a flavour of ‘solipsism’” (41). The solipsism appears when the subject is strictly delimited from its own embodiment and consequently is construed as a mind in isolation except for its sensory inputs from the world in which it lives. By contrast, Toulmin finds in Montaigne a sense of the embodied self whose richly particular experiences are taken as representative or typical of what it means to be a human being. “For Montaigne ‘(life) experience’ is the practical experience that each human individual accumulates through dealing with many coequal others: for Descartes, ‘(mind) experience’ is raw material from which each individual builds a cognitive map of the intelligible world ‘in the head’” (42). This contrast for Toulmin epitomizes a larger contrast. That larger con‑ trast is between the decontextualized rationalism of the 17th­‑century scientif‑ ic philosophers with their “theoretical ambitions and intellectual constraints” and the older “restatements of classical scepticism” in the “practical modesty and the intellectual freedom” of the late 16th­‑century humanist philosophers. Rationalism with its roots in natural philosophy and humanism with its roots in classical literature are then the two revolutions at the origins of mo‑ dernity. It is rationalism however with its Cartesian understandings of ratio‑ nality and abstract moral value that succeeds in displacing the polyvalent scep‑ tical exploration of late renaissance humanism in such thinkers as Montaigne. The recognition of uncertainty, ambiguity, and contingency gives way to the quest for certainty, clarity, and necessity.

The Disputed Origins of Modernity Given these two pictures of the relationships between the work of Montaigne and that of Descartes, how do Toulmin’s and Taylor’s pictures contrast? One important contrast is that of orientation. Whereas Taylor’s discus‑ sion is largely oriented with one eye on how both Descartes and Montaigne stress different aspects of the turn towards subjectivity and selfhood, Toulmin is much more centrally concerned with how these two figures construe the relation between subjectivity and world, selfhood and embodiment. Thus if the mind­‑body problem can be taken as a general way of capturing Toulmin’s

16



Modernities and Histories

orientation, Taylor’s orientation stands rather under the sign of the problem of personal identity. This difference in orientation has as its complement a difference in the respective attitudes towards the nature of the account that is offered. In Tay‑ lor’s case, as we have seen, we are urged to view the historical discussion of the early modern origins of the modern identity as an exercise in interpretive understanding rather than as an attempt at historical explanation. Toulmin’s story by contrast continually emphasizes causal connections among the disparate events of the two tumultuous generations that separate Descartes from Montaigne. Unlike Taylor, Toulmin nowhere explicitly ad‑ dresses the question of just how we are expected to take his account. But the structure of that account, as well as the way the key elements are related to each other, suggest more of historical explanation than of interpretation. A further difference emerges once we focus on several of those elements in their own right. Both Taylor and Toulmin are interested in understanding just how a certain idea of rationality gradually takes form in the work of the scientific philosophers. But, unlike Taylor, Toulmin pays great attention to the important difference within the early modern period between the shifting priorities of one kind of discourse over another. Thus, where Taylor focuses exclusively on just how radical reflexivity dif‑ fers in Descartes and Montaigne, Toulmin insists on how the priority of rhet‑ oric and argumentation over logic and argument in humanist philosophers like Montaigne and Bacon is reversed two generations later in scientific phi‑ losophers like Descartes and Galileo. Toulmin’s sensitivity to differing kinds of discourse in the early modern period as well as to shifting priorities among these discourses is not characteristic of Taylor’s readings. Still another general contrast between the two accounts turns on their relative sensitivities to the problems of historical stereotyping. This is an issue that Taylor seems to pass over in silence. By contrast, Toulmin is much concerned to identify just what are the car‑ dinal elements of the standard historical account of the early modern period. He wants to criticize these elements in the light of the most recent historio‑ graphical consenses. Still more, Toumin wants finally to offer an alternative view that is designed to side step the stereotypes while continuing to narrow the gap between what happened in the early modern period and how we un‑ derstand today what happened then. While both Taylor and Toulmin are responsive to the need for so­‑called “thick description” of any complex historical phenomenon like the emergence of the modern identity – they both cite Geertz’s work10 – it is Toulmin rather

17

Essay I

than Taylor who takes pains to protect his own account from any undue influ‑ ences by now discredited historical stereotypes. The most important difference between these two accounts however concerns neither orientation, nor historical considerations, nor thematic con‑ cerns, nor historical stereotypes, but their specific treatments of Montaigne and Descartes. Taylor insists on juxtaposing the two thinkers whom he deals with non‑ chronologically, first Descartes and then Montaigne. His plan is to organize their similar reflections on radical reflexivity in complementary ways. The aim is to show that Descartes’s disengaged subjectivity can be seen as part of an early modern pattern of inwardness that Montaigne complements with his account of the exploring self. And this nonlinear approach is consistent with Taylor’s mainly interpretive rather than explanatory task. Toulmin by contrast insists on the rigors of chronology in his discussion, carefully looking in detail at several central themes in Montaigne’s works before looking in similar detail at Descartes to discover their transformations. This final contrast leads to the most striking differences between Toulmin and Taylor. For where Taylor sees two related strands of a similar concern with kinds of inwardness in the emergence of the modern identity in Descartes and Montaigne, Toulmin sees two radically different revolutions epitomizied in the work of Montaigne and Descartes. For Toulmin, the chronologically later Cartesian revolution effectively undoes the results of the earlier humanistic revolution. Thus, Toulmin does not see the emergence of the modern identity in the complementary emphasis on disengaged subjectivity and on an engaged exploratory self in Descartes and Montaigne. Rather, he sees the humanistic philosophical discoveries of rationality in sceptical, contingent, and modest terms giving way to the scientific philosophical construction of rationality in terms of certainty, necessity, and metaphysical pride. Thus the two stories we find in these investigations of the origins of modernity comprise contrasting portraits of complementary figures of Mon‑ taigne and Descartes in a foreground, while in the background we find dif‑ fering renderings of the understandings of history, language, body and mind, personal identity, and finally rationality itself.

The Frames of Our Histories and Modernities One central question that arises then is just what effects if any the very dif‑ ferent accounts of the origins of modernity in Toulmin and the origins of the modern identity in Taylor, centred as they are on very different ways of

18



Modernities and Histories

treating the relations between Montaigne and Descartes, should have on our attempts in the following essays to take the critical measure of Taylor’s “given ontology of the human experience?” If we are not to attempt that critique without situating Taylor’s moral ontology in the context of his historical narrative, well enough and good. But when a situation of at least one of the three central phases of this extended narrative turns out to comprise a strongly controversial reading of the rela‑ tions among rationality, moral selfhood, and knowledge in such cardinal key figures as Montaigne and Descartes, how are we to understand the key link? This key link is what Taylor wants us to respect between his thematic inquiries into the moral sources of the self and his interpretive but apparently short sighted historical narrative? The main issue here – for there are several – is how to conciliate two opposed states of affairs. On the one hand, any adequate critical evaluation of Taylor’s striking proposals about articulating the moral ontologies implied in those transcendent spiritual issues that underlie many of our immanent moral intuitions today must consider both the formal coherence of that ontology el‑ ements as well as the historical development of that particular moral ontology itself. But the interpretive account of such an ontology’s moral development as opposed to an explanatory account on examination seems to conflate two quite distinct moments in the emergence of the modern identity under the guise of reading such moments as complements. Thus the problem that comes clear is just which historical interpretation of the emergence of the modern identity is to be understood as normative in our own philosophic reflections. Are we to follow the dialectic in Taylor’s interpretation? This is the dialectic between system and history, between ne‑ cessity and transcendence on the one side – what he calls givenness – and con‑ tingency and immanence on the other – what he calls emergence. In the end we are left with the further question as to just how strongly Taylor wants us to understand the relation between his thematic and historical investigations. If one of the elements can be described reasonably well and unambigu‑ ously but not adequately criticized without reference to the other, where the other element can be suitably criticized in the light of alternative accounts but not unambiguously described (it is necessarily incomplete we remembered Taylor insisting), then just how important finally is the link between the two? The situation is very much analogous to Hilary Putnam’s talk about dy‑ namic and dialectic relations between standards and contexts when dealing with very general metaphysical and logical frameworks.11 Here however in‑ stead of standards we have vague, brief, but stimulating talk about a “given on‑

19

Essay I

tology of human experience,” a very different matter indeed than standards. And instead of contexts we have a sweeping, comprehensive, yet carefully argued selective juxtaposition of two major moments in the movement of European thought from the end of the 16th to the early part of the 17th­ ‑century. For this is when our modern understanding of both standards and moral ontologies are forged – again a much larger matter than merely chang‑ ing contexts.

Envoi: The Remaining Tension It is not clear, then, how we can easily resolve this tension in Taylor’s work between a shifting dialectic of histories and modernities on the one side and the need for truly critical discussion of such a shifting dialectic on the other.12 And if we are not clear about how such a tension can be resolved, how would Taylor have us sympathetically but critically evaluate his extraordinarily ambi‑ tious claims to disengage the central assumptions of something so bold as “the given ontology of human experience”? In some of the essays that follow I try to engage some particular aspects of this very general question.

20



Modernities and Histories

Endnotes 1

This is a revised version of a paper that first appeared in Eleutheria, 3 (1990), 2–15 as the second part of an extended critical review of C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989). I am grateful to J. Lowry and to F. Peddle for their many constructive comments.

2

 Ibid., p. 204.

3

S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 44.

4

C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989).

5

Unless otherwise indicated, references within the text are to Taylor’s book noted above.

6

For other critical perspectives see the reviews of B. Williams and J. Glover in, re‑ spectively, The New York Review of Books, 8 November 1990, and London Review of Books, 22 November 1990.

7

Contrast Taylor’s view here with the complex and pessimistic vision to be found in L. Kolakowski’s collection, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

8

Consider the very different picture we find of the same period in D. R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia UP, 1970). I am grateful to Frank Peddle for showing me the pertinence of this excellent study.

9

New York: The Free Press, 1990. Unless otherwise indicated, references in this section of the text refer to Toulmin’s 1992 book.

10

Cf. J. C. Alexander et al., eds., Interpreting Clifford Geertz (London: Palgrave/Mac‑ millan, 2011.

11

See especially his The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987).

12

For the requisite contexts see Taylor’s Philosophical Papers, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) and several of their most searching reviews such as those by J. Lear in London Review of Books, 19 September 1985, and by R. Rorty in the TLS, 6 December 1985. Part of the larger critical response can be found in a special Symposium on Taylor’s Sources of the Self in Inquiry, 34 (1991) with papers by Q. Skinner, M. Rosen, S. R. L. Clark, M. Löw­‑Beer, W. Kymlicka, together with Taylor’s replies.

21

22

Essay II: Internationalizing Law1 «Humaniser la violence en interdisant les crimes de guerre est en effet l’une des premières manifestations de la communauté humaine de valeurs qui émerge progres‑ sivement à l’ombre de la communauté interétatique.» –Mireille Delmas­‑Marty2 Ricoeur summarized his most basic ethical intuition as «la visée de la vie bonne, avec et pour les autres, dans les institutions justes.» –Paul Ricoeur3

The often difficult relations between philosophy and law sometimes seem smoother than usual. Accordingly, what merits further reflection within our various modernities are several important contact points between exemplary work in international law and political theory and some perhaps even better known philosophical work on the nature of the individual. Mireille Delmas­‑Marty4 and Paul Ricoeur5 (1913–2005) have made sev‑ eral major contributions to ongoing reflection about the variety of relations among political, social, and individual realities. And over the last ten years or so before the death of Paul Ricoeur, each became more aware of the other’s work on some parallel themes. Here, the interest is not with many of the most important issues in the extraordinarily extensive work of each of these major figures. Rather, I would like to enlist the help of several of their reflections only in attempting to make more precise just what is the nature of the specific limitations on individual sovereignties or autonomies. The larger concern is with the increasing inter‑ nationalization of law. Accordingly, my focus here will be a rather narrow one on some only of the many quite striking reflections in their later works on the nature of the individual.6

23

Essay II

Individual Autonomies and the Community of Values In an instructive interview on the occasion of the publication of her 2012 book, Résister, responsabiliser, anticiper,7 Delmas­‑Marty calls attention to a cer‑ tain proximity she finds between her own reflections on international law and the thought of Paul Ricoeur.8 Notably in the same interview she endorses Ricoeur’s idea that a particular society and, we may add, the individuals that compose such a society, can surely live without an ideology; but they cannot live without a certain utopia.9 That is, when the horizons of reflective individuals within a society at a particular historical moment are obscured – think of the small number of individuals inhabiting rather precariously certain of the Cycladic islands in the early Aegean Bronze Age – the idea of a utopia may play “a dynamic role for enlarging the field of the possible, mobilizing energies, and setting in motion [individuals’] human imagination and voluntariness.” In these circumstances, utopias may not improperly be said to function like those juridical groups that are still caught up in an ongoing formative process. In certain groups of individuals a utopia would seem to function, Delmas­ ‑Marty continues while appealing to one of her characteristic similes, like the wispy order of certain cloudy masses. Part of her point here is to recall Ricoeur’s own earlier reflections on utopias. For Ricoeur utopias may serve as occasional place­‑holders for the value horizons of certain groups of individu‑ als that have become obscure. And recalling such views is, for Delmas­‑Marty, to recall the uncertain status in Europe today and in the world of the evolving notion of sovereignty. That is, the notion of a reasonable and differentiated sovereignty is no longer a clear horizon providing guidance. Such sovereignty – political, social, and individual – might be said to have become, at best, a wispy order among the clouds. These might be the clouds, for instance, of wispy United Na‑ tions’ discussions on whether Syria’s political sovereignty and especially the individual sovereignty of its in fact hereditary leader, Bashar Al­‑Assad, may be compromised in order, after so very many civilian deaths at the hands of officially organized government violence, to save its citizens from continued maiming and dying. As a specialist in international law and a theorist in the philosophy of law, Delmas­‑Marty has rightly focused on what Ricoeur thinks of as the central problem of the philosophy of law. This problem is the problem of peace, the judicial phenomenon of non­‑violence. And an important part of her central

24





Internationalizing Law

later project is the internationalization of human rights law as an ongoing contribution to the resolution of this problem.10 By contrast, as a philosopher who among other matters is concerned with issues more in political philosophy than in the philosophy of law, Ricoeur be‑ lieves that the central problem for political philosophers is not peace but war. This problem is the problem of the historical phenomena of mass violence.11 And part of Ricoeur’s central late project was the further elucidation of the nature of evil as a partial response to the problem of violence. Each of these two central problems – the problem of peace and the prob‑ lem of war – however, has importantly different contexts.

The Task of Peace Today For an international law specialist like Delmas­‑Marty, part of the demanding present task is to overcome the persistent obstacles that stand in the way of enforcing peace through the evolution of international law. This evolution involves among other elements the gradual circumscribing of political state sovereignties in particular.12 The task of peace today, on Delmas­‑Marty’s account, is largely a contem‑ porary one. This task begins mainly just after the cataclysms of the second of the two world wars of the twentieth century. And this still present task has to be understood in both historical terms and judicial terms. The first phase on this judicial reading of sovereignties was the 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights, an attempt to realize a global inter‑ nationalization of law with universalist ambitions. But in a second phase, de‑ spite regional advances especially in Europe, the occurrence of the Cold War brought this universalist ambition to limit sovereignties largely to a halt. 13 After the Cold War ended in 1989 with the unification of Germany, and after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a third phase in the evolutions of sovereignty ensued with the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1994. In this phase a slow but quite definite global convergence of financial, trading, and commercial interests re­‑launched the earlier ideal of universaliz‑ ing international law. In 2001, however, with the terrorist attacks on the United States at the New York Trade Centre, the internationalization of human rights law began a new phase of critical reflection on the nature and legal ramifications of glob‑ al terrorism, as today in Africa’s Sahel regions. Moreover, the extraordinary world economic crisis that began in the US in 2008 raised new questions

25

Essay II

about the limitations that needed to be imposed on international currency movements and financial speculation. The current phase, Dalmas­‑Marty appears to hold, the phase of global terrorism and increasing European political disorder, is precisely one in which the horizon of basic human values has become obscure with the blurring of the distinction between wars and crimes. One result has been the return of an overly narrow, and now largely de‑ fensive, understanding of sovereignty in almost exclusively political terms. Another has been the growing attention of philosophers to the implications of the changing faces of sovereignty limitations and related issues for the con‑ duct of morally and ethically proper lives.14 Many prominent philosophers of law and political philosophers, includ‑ ing Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz, Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and Ricoeur as well would agree with Delmas­‑Marty’s basic contention here. Her contention is that reflective individuals within such advanced post­‑modern societies as those we find struggling in Europe today have increasing difficul‑ ties discerning the horizons and the limitations especially of individual sover‑ eignties and autonomies. For her part Delmas­‑Marty looks to an analysis of commonalities among not just states and societies but also among individuals as a resource for mov‑ ing forward the project of the progressive development of international law and its eventual universalization. But the key insight of her own approach to different kinds of commonalities is the insistence on pluralisms, including on what Ricoeur has called the pluralization of judiciary institutions.15 Delmas­‑Marty is much impressed by the different times that the coordi‑ nation of various sectors of international law seems to require. For example, international commercial law develops at a different rhythm than, say, inter‑ national human rights law. Facing such facts Delmas­‑Marty understands that the identification of commonalities that might ensure a certain harmony in the spread of international law requires order of a certain kind. And it requires time. Since, however, world government does not exist and hence there is “no coherent and stable system of law at the world level,”16 international law today must be sufficiently supple and constantly evolving in order to preserve sig‑ nificant differences. Orchestrating such differences into the harmonies that reveal substantive commonalities is what she has called an “ordered plural‑ ism.” For Delmas­‑Marty, then, the crucial step towards the proper limitations of sovereignty – political first of all but also social and individual – is the

26





Internationalizing Law

achievement of an efficacious recognition of “a global community of values” underlying such an ordered pluralism.17

Limitations and the Capacities of Individuals Ricoeur would disagree with Delmas­‑Marty neither on her sketch of recent European history nor on the diagnosis of the current European situation. Nor would he disagree on the need both to identify a global community of human values that underlies whatever ordered pluralisms we may continue to con‑ struct in the progressive internationalization of law. Ricoeur was quite attentive to political developments at both the Euro‑ pean and global levels, especially in his later years. These were the years of his explicit reflections on issues in political philosophy and to a lesser extent issues in the philosophy of law.18 Ricoeur nonetheless insisted on a much wid‑ er context for specifying the limits of sovereignty in general and individual sovereignties in particular. That wider context has, at least for Ricoeur, two major components. One set derives from an, at times, quasi­‑Hegelian understanding of certain ele‑ ments only in the philosophy of history,19 in particular from what Ricoeur dramatically calls “the tragedy of action.”20 The other comes from his long sustained philosophical reflections on the contingencies of individual human capacities, from what he calls “fallible man.”21 Ricoeur characteristically thinks of contemporary events with respect to the long sweep of Western civilization. He is particularly knowledgeable about the biblical and classical backgrounds of current events. And he has often drawn on his interpretative readings of major texts in both to inform his attempts to understand some of the works of his contemporaries. Moreover, Ricoeur has demonstrated a lifetime’s critical preoccupa‑ tion with the history of Western philosophy. He has returned regularly, and imaginatively, to Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and to a great number of more recent figures.22 Unlike Charles Taylor and Stephen Toulmin, however, Ricoeur has rather neglected Montaigne, a cardinal figure whose works directly lead into some of Ricoeur’s own central concerns.23 Recognizing these unusually well­ ‑read backgrounds are essential for coming to understand the character of Ricoeur’s insistence on what he takes to be “the tragedy of action.” What makes action tragic is the omnipresence for Ricoeur of the workings of evil.24 What evil itself is would seem to be impervious to philosophical reflec‑ tion by itself.25 But whatever evil may or may not be, after long reflection and

27

Essay II

debate Ricoeur has come to hold that evil certainly exists. For what most fun‑ damentally accounts for the overwhelming violence and warfare of so much human activity in the course of European history is, on Ricoeur’s considered views, evil itself.26 Ricoeur takes up this theme from the very beginnings of his work. And he does so, given the density of evil and its relative impenetrability to phil‑ osophical reflection alone, by examining some of its most salient symbolic representations in the Tanak, the Hebrew bible.27 The results of these early investigations colour Ricoeur’s much of his later reflections, especially those on issues in political philosophy, including issues of sovereignty.28 And those reflections themselves come to focus on the mysteriousness of evil. In particular, Ricoeur stresses the stubborn and apparently endless resistance of evil to any satisfactory exclusively rational explanation. And he insists on evil’s extraordinary capacity to distort human actions and to wreak havoc throughout the course of history itself. Despite these sombre analyses, however, throughout the extent of his work Ricoeur keeps returning to the importance of hope and to the primacy of trust in philosophical efforts to comprehend the underlying nature of the limits of human action.29 His conviction seems to be that all human action is necessarily limited because of many factors. But perhaps the most daunting of such factors remains the existence and persistence of evil in all its many guises. Given that philosophical commitment to elucidating so far as he can the realities and the actuality of evil, Ricoeur’s attempts to keep human horizons open to some reasonable forms of transcendence have struck some of his crit‑ ics as special pleading. But however persistent the criticisms of his views on the tragedy of action,30 Ricoeur has struggled to remain philosophical faithful to the basic openness of the nature of human beings as well as to the causal openness of the nature of the physical world.

The Contingent and Individual Autonomy Besides his insistence on the threatened character of human action, its tragic dimension, as part of the essential nature of what makes up individual autono‑ my, Ricoeur advocates perhaps even more fundamentally the basically flawed character of human nature itself. For Ricoeur, this notion when examined philosophically comes under the general heading of the utter contingency of human beings, their unavoidable limitations. But well before Ricoeur began to examine in strictly philosophical ways not just the echoes of this basic theme in the history of Western philosophy

28



Internationalizing Law

but also its elements, he once again approached his topic indirectly. For at the same time as he had undertaken an indirect examination of the nature of evil by way of a sustained reflection on its symbolic representations in the Tanak, Ricoeur also undertook an indirect examination as well of the nature of hu‑ man fallibility in certain experiences of human life.31 Later in his more mature work Ricoeur continued to elaborate on what he sometimes called his “philosophical anthropology.”32 The core of those re‑ flections on what we might call the idea of human nature Ricoeur developed in his late major work, his revised and extended Gifford Lectures Oneself as Another.33 In that work the key chapters are Studies VII, VIII, and IX. Ricoeur of‑ ten refered to these three chapters as his “petite éthique” or his ethics or moral philosophy. Much before his Gifford lectures, however, Ricoeur had already summarized his basic ethical intuition as “la visée de la vie bonne, avec et pour les autres, dans les institutions justes.”34 Rendered roughly, this adage in English might read as “the goal of the good life is to live with and for others within the domains of just institutions.” At the basis of this fundamental ethical in‑ tuition is a quite differentiated view of the human subject. Ricoeur takes the ethical subject as above all the capable human being, the capable subject who is an individual who has developed the capacity of “speaking, acting, narrating himself, and taking himself as responsible for his actions.”35 He goes on to refine some of the implications of this programmatic view in his later piece on “Who is the Subject of the Law?”36 With respect specifically to the limitations of the capable human individ‑ ual, however, Ricoeur’s central reflections mainly derive not from his ethics. Rather, they derive from his long preoccupations with the work of the still rather little known French figure of “la philosophie reflexive,” Jean Nabert (1881–1960).37 Ricoeur wrote no fewer than three carefully prepared prefaces for each of Nabert’s three major works on the occasion of their respective republica‑ tion.38 Perhaps the most important of Nabert’s works for Ricoeur was his El‑ ements for an Ethic which Nabert published in the midst of the Second World War in 1943 and then republished with Ricoeur’s preface in 1962.39 The central issue for Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology in Nabert’s reflexive philosophy turned out to be the three opening themes of Nabert’s Eléments. These themes were, in Nabert’s ordering, the experience of fault, the meaning of failure, and the deepening of solitude.40 As Ricoeur pointed out in his Preface, Nabert’s reflection begins in feel‑ ing. But then this reflection derives its entire reflexive energy for continuing

29

Essay II

from what Ricoeur calls the “difference in potential between the aspiration of its desire to be and the experience ‘of the resistance which this expansion encounters or of the weaknesses of which the self is guilty.’”41 This resistance takes on what one distinguished contemporary French philosopher has called the character of “a triple negativity.”42 These three ne‑ gations are the negation of all the predicates of the “necessary being” of natu‑ ral theology, the negation of anything divine in the phenomena of witnessing, and the negation in the feeling of what is unjustifiable. The triple negativity is what enables Ricoeur to stake out his own re‑ markable and continuing reflection on the Cartesian tradition. The triple negativity also helped Ricoeur come to terms with the prolongations of that tradition in reflexive philosophy as finally centred on what Ricoeur repeatedly, and memorably, called the “cogito blessé,” the wounded cogito. The central limitations on individual sovereignty, when viewed from Ricoeur’s phenomenological and hermeneutic vantage point here, turn out then to be not so much those that arise from any individual’s ineluctable con‑ tingency or even, more particularly, from the contingent individual’s just as unavoidable fallibility. Rather, individual sovereignty or autonomy is necessar‑ ily limited by the inescapable experiences of solitude, failure, and fault.

Envoi: The Reflexive Triad The reflexive triad of human experiences is what Paul Ricoeur returned to continually, although always discretely, in his philosophical dealings with the problem of evil. This reflexive triad of human experiences underlies Delmas– Marty’s explorations of punishment, pardon, and reconciliation in the prob‑ lem of peace. And the very same reflexive triad of fault, failure, and solitude is what continues to make so problematic the ongoing tasks today of the inter‑ nationalization of law.

30



Internationalizing Law

Endnotes 1

This text is a revised version of some materials first published in Eco­‑Ethica 3 (2014), pp. 185–195.

2

M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers Une Communauté de Valeurs? (Paris: Seuil, 2011), p. 22.

3

P. Ricoeur. Autour de la politique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 258.

4

Her major recent work is the four volume Forces imaginaires du droit (see M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers une communauté de valeurs: les forces imaginantes de droit, 4 vols. [Paris: Seuil, 2004–2011]). More recently, see M. Delmas­‑Marty, “Environne‑ ment, éthique et droit,” Eco­‑Ethica 5 (2016), pp. 31–40.

5

Ricoeur’s major late work is La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).The standard (and book­‑length) bibliography is D. Vansina, Bibliographie Paul Ricoeur (Leuwen: Peeters, 2000). A key to Ricoeur’s sometimes non­‑standard use of cen‑ tral terms can be found in O. Abel and J. Porée, Le vocabulaire de Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Ellipse, 2009).

6

e will limit our concerns here mainly but not exclusively to the reflections in W M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers Une Communauté de Valeurs? (Paris: Seuil 2011), M. Delmas­‑Marty, Résister, responsabiliser, anticiper (Paris: Seuil, 2012) and those in P. Ricoeur, L’Idéologie et l’Utopie (Paris: Seuil, 1996) and P. Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).

7

M. Delmas­‑Marty, Résister, responsabiliser, anticiper (Paris: Seuil, 2012).

8

Le Monde des livres, January 25, 2013, p. 7.

9

For his reflections on ideology see for example P. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (NY: Columbia UP, 1986), pp. 423–426, and for his reflections on utopias see for example ibid., pp. 257–262.

10

For one of her current project with respect to an EU­‑wide public prosecutor’s department see M. Delmas­‑Marty, “Creons un parquet européen,» Le Monde, June 27, 2012.

11

P. Ricoeur, Le Juste I (Paris: Esprit, 1995), p. 10.

12

Note that Delmas­‑Marty understands the notion of sovereignty in largely the in‑ ternational senses noted much earlier (see R. Jackson, Sovereignty [Cambridge: Polity, 2007], especially pp. 10–23) and according to French interpretations (see Dictionnaire pratique du droit humanitaire, éd. F. Bouchet­‑Saulnier, 3ième éd. [Paris: La Découverte, 2006], pp. 507–508). She also distinguishes between “souveraineté” and “souverainisme” (see M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers Une Communauté de Valeurs?

31

Essay II

[Paris: Seuil, 2011], pp. 122 and 127). The first assumes different kinds (political and, more broadly, social and individual), whereas the second is used to make an explicit contrast with “universalisme.” 13

Delmas­‑Marty has used this periodization in several of her works such as M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers Une Communauté de Valeurs? (Paris: Seuil, 2011). For the discussion here of “phases” I rely on her summary account in M. Delmas­‑Marty, Resister, responsabiliser, anticiper (Paris: Le Seuil, 2013).

14

Signs of this growing philosophical attention include the high level of philosophi‑ cal discussion at the regular meetings of the Law and Social Philosophy Colloqui‑ um at University College London and those at the equally high­‑level Law and So‑ cial Philosophy Colloquium in the New York University Law School. In Germany, moreover, the work of the Frankfurt School has continued into the outstanding contributions of a third generation of scholars such as Rainer Forst and others. Some of this work has found a regular place in the widely read pages of The New York Review of Books ever since its inception fifty years ago.

15

In the 1990s Ricoeur became associated with Institut des hautes études pour la justice and the Ordre des avocats au barreau de Paris for which he wrote several important papers. See for example P. Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 29–40, pp. 185–192, and pp. 209–221.

16

M. Delmas­‑Marty, Resister, responsabiliser, anticiper (Paris: Le Seuil, 2013), p. 7.

17

Cf. M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers Une Communauté de Valeurs? (Paris: Seuil, 2011), pp. 352–357.

18

See among others the essays in P. Ricoeur, L’Idéologie et l’Utopie (Paris: Seuil, 1996) and P. Ricoeur, L’Herméneutique biblique (Paris: Le Cerf, 2001).

19

P. Ricoeur, Temps et recit: Le temps raconté (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), pp. 364–372.

20

See especially the posthumously published P. Ricoeur, “Vers la Grèce antique: De la nostalgie au deuil,” Esprit, N° 399 (November), pp. 22–41 and the accompanying philosophical reflections in Foessel and Lamouche 2007, pp. 15–21 and 42–84.

21

Cf. Ricoeur’s intellectual autobiography, P. Ricoeur. Réflexion faite. Autobiographie intellectuelle, Paris: Esprit, 1995, pp. 11–82.

22

See P. Ricoeur, Le Juste I (Paris: Esprit, 1995).

23

Cf. above Essay I.

24

See for instance his article in the special issue of Esprit devoted to his work, P. Ricoeur, La nature et la règle, ce qui nous fait penser (avec J.-P. Changeux) (Paris: O. Jacob, 1998).

32



Internationalizing Law

25

On Ricoeur’s usage of the expression “mal” see O. Abel and J. Porée, Le vocabu‑ laire de Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Ellipses, 2009), pp. 77–80.

26

For one example only see P. Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance (Paris: Galli‑ mard, 2004), pp. 462–465.

27

P. Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1960).

28

See especially P. Ricoeur, L’Idéologie et l’Utopie (Paris: Seuil, 1996), pp. 163–221.

29

Cf. P. Ricoeur, Philosophie, éthique et politique: Entretiens et dialogues, ed. C. Gold‑ stein (Paris: Seuil, 2017).

30

See for example the critical but sympathetic two volume collection of essays in Ricoeur: Cahiers de L’Herne, éd. F. Revault­‑d’Allonnes et F. Azouvi, 2 vols. (Paris: 2004).

31

P. Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1960).

32

P. Ricoeur, Le Juste I (Paris: Esprit, 1995), p. 17.

33

See P. Ricoeur, Soi-Même comme un autre (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990), translated as P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992).

34

P. Ricoeur, Autour de la politique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 258.

35

P. Ricoeur, Le Juste I (Paris: Esprit, 1995), p. 18 where he summarizes his earlier, 1990 views on the nature of the individual human subject.

36

Ibid., pp. 29–40.

37

For the idea and the genealogy of “reflexive philosophy,” see Nabert’s 1957 En‑ cyclopédie française article (Vol. 19), “La philosophie réflexive,” re­‑published in J. Nabert, Éléments pour une ethique (Paris: Aubier, 1992). For a bibliography of Nabert’s work see S. Robillard, Bibliographie de Jean Nabert, in Jean Nabert et la Question du divin, éd. P. Capelle­‑Dumont (Paris: Cerf, 2003), pp. 155–158.

38

Bibliographical details can be found in D. Vansina, Bibliographie Paul Ricoeur (Leuwen: Peeters, 2000).

39

Nabert 1943, 2nd ed. 1962, translated with Ricoeur’s Preface as J. Nabert, Elements for an Ethic, tr. W. J. Petrik (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969).

40

J. Nabert, Elements for an Ethic, tr. W. J. Petrik (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969), pp. 3–38.

41

Ricoeur in Nabert 1969, p. xvii, citing J. Nabert, Elements for an Ethic, tr. W. J. Petrik (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969), p. 4.

33

Essay II

42

34

Jean Nabert et la Question du divin, éd. P. Capelle­‑Dumont (Paris: Cerf, 2003), p. 44. I thank Philippe Capelle­‑Dumont for a personal copy of this work.

Essay III: Nature and Education1 Zeno taught that human beings are well advised “to live according to nature” (homologoumenôs tê phusei zên). – Diogenes Laertius2 “Sometime around 1970 a shift of perspective oc‑ curred in the mental world of the West. An ecological consciousness arose; the need to protect nature came to have a degree of urgency it never had before – in‑ deed, the very idea of nature as something that could be protected was unheard of … In consequence of the shift of perspective in the 1960’s and the 70’s, environ‑ mental movements were formed.” – Lars Hertzberg3

In our present historical contexts after modernity how are informed educa‑ tional communities to navigate successfully between the educational aims and programs of scientistic worldviews on the one hand and the educational aims and programs of fundamentalist worldviews on the other? In this essay I try to explore the idea that perhaps fresh philosophical reflection is in order. For there is need to open up some middle ways between such unacceptable extremes of otherwise unobjectionable scientific reason and religious faith. That reflection I believe should focus freshly on a critique of several of the traditional views still underlying our discussions today of nature itself.

Living According to Nature Recall briefly that the idea of nature in education first arises in European contexts in the protracted inquiries of Plato, Aristotle, and their successors among especially the ancient Stoic philosophers. The Stoics were deeply con‑

35

Essay III

cerned with understanding what it means to learn to live naturally, that is, to live according to nature. Summarily speaking, the major Stoic philosophers were active from roughly the 4th century BCE to the second century CE.4 Specialists usually divide their work into three rather unequal periods called ancient Stoicism (301–145 BCE), middle Stoicism (145 BCE–45 CE), and late or imperial Sto‑ icism (45–180 CE). The ancient Stoics are mainly Zeno of Citium (335–262 BCE),5 Clean‑ thes of Assos (331–229 BCE), and Chryssipus of Soles (281–204 BCE), the middle Stoics Panetius of Rhodes (185–100 BCE) and Posidonius of Apamée (140–51 BCE), and the imperial Stoics Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE), Epictetus (50– 130 CE), and Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE).6 Although the titles of many of their extensive works and those of others are known from mention in a variety of sources of uneven value, knowledge of their contents remains piecemeal.7 According to the early third century CE Greek doxographer, Diogenes Laertius (? 3rd century CE), Zeno taught that human beings are well advised “to live according to nature” (homologoumenôs tê phusei zên).8 Why? Because living according to nature allows one to accept the things that are proper to oneself (in educational contexts recall Rousseau’s talk of “natural tenden‑ cies”) and to reject those that are not. Such reasons are of course not cogent for everyone. But leaving the rea‑ sons aside for the moment, how are we to understand the cardinal expression here, “nature” (phusis)? In the same Book VII of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers Diogenes Laertius took Zeno’s talk of “nature” in the phrase “to live according to na‑ ture” to denote a special force. This force is the one that for Zeno contains the cosmos and that produces everything that comes from the cosmos. Earlier, the Greek philosopher and physician, Galen of Pergamum (129– 210 CE),9 wrote of nature as a fire (pyr texnikon). Nature as a fire had for Galen a primordial role in the genesis of the cosmos. In for example his work On Medical Definitions Galen takes nature as a creative and energetic mix of forces at both the cosmic level (think of im‑ mense optical stellar jets streaming from active galactic cores) and at the level of human beings where this force is full of life and even reason (Galen’s own example is of hot breath moving through and also on the human body).10 And with regard to Galen’s claim concerning reason in the cosmos, recall the sum‑ mary adage of the imperial Stoic Seneca in his Letters on Ethics that “universal nature is rational.”11

36



Nature and Education

All living things according to the early Stoics are so made as to be es‑ sentially inclined to promote what is for their own proper continuation in existence. They are also so made as to be essentially inclined to avoid anything that might harm that continued existence. In addition to this constitutive characteristic inclination (hormé) of all living beings, human beings in partic‑ ular are also endowed with reason (logos). The early Stoic Chrysippus, for example in his On Ends, argues that it is inconceivable that nature could constitute a living being that would be es‑ tranged from its own particular nature instead of being adapted to that na‑ ture.12 The adaptation in question here comes to what we might call an almost instinctual inclination for self­‑preservation. Further to their being naturally attracted and naturally repulsed from those things that either promote or harm their well­‑being as existing organic wholes, human beings also have the capacity to examine rationally what they are naturally inclined towards or against. Thus, for those living beings who are human beings, “living according to nature” is not so much living according to natural inclinations, that is, according to sensations. Rather, for human beings “living according to nature” is, as Seneca held in his work De vita beata, living according to reason.13

Nature as the Observable Universe With at least these few reminders from ancient Greek Stoic reflection freshly in mind about on what living naturally might mean, what conceptual adjust‑ ments are required in the light of our own very different histories and in the wake of our multiple modernities? In other words, what is the nature of na‑ ture as understood in Europe today? After reflection, I believe that there are at least three major changes re‑ quired in the traditional ideas of nature that still subsume so many false beliefs about education today. The first major change is in our understandings of nature itself as the cosmos. In ordinary English language usages, at least in Europe today and for a very long time previously, people understand the English word “cosmos” to denote “the universe as an ordered whole.” Indeed, this understanding dates from the development of the English language in the Middle English period between roughly 1150 to 1350 CE.14 Already, this common English language understanding today of nature as cosmos is far from the Stoic understanding of cosmos as “world; the or‑ ganized and structured portion of the universe.”15 For the Stoics the cosmos

37

Essay III

always needs to be understood with respect to what they call god, the world, and the vide or the vacuum.16 Evidently, educating persons today to live naturally in the sense of learn‑ ing how to live in accordance with nature when nature is understood as the cosmos in traditional Stoic terms would contradict even everyday understand‑ ings of cosmos. Such a project would also contradict today’s even more differ‑ ent scientific understandings of nature as the cosmos. Although many contemporary scientific accounts of nature are difficult for ordinarily educated persons to understand without quite advanced math‑ ematical knowledge, nonetheless the main outlines of current understandings of the nature of the universe as a cosmos are easily accessible. For example, a concise, reliable, and relatively recent account is readily on hand in the “Overview” of the Oxford Companion to Cosmology.17 Contemporary science distinguishes, although rather roughly, between nature as cosmos and nature as the universe. The contemporary understand‑ ing of nature as the cosmos is the idea of nature as the entire universe, a gen‑ eral idea that is close to but not identical with ancient Stoic views. But our scientific contemporaries divide the study of the cosmos or cosmology into physical cosmology, metaphysical cosmology, religious cosmology, and eso‑ teric cosmology.18 Physical cosmology, for example the current Standard Cosmological Model,19 is “the study of the universe through scientific calculation, obser‑ vation, and experiment.” By contrast, metaphysical cosmology, for example, current multiverse scenarios, is the study of “questions beyond the scope of science, and makes conjectures which are not (yet) observationally testable.”20 Religious cosmology, historically the earliest form of cosmology, for ex‑ ample Buddhist and Hindu accounts, studies the universe in terms of reli‑ gious beliefs about the creation of the universe. And esoteric cosmology, for example Sufism and the Kabbalah, studies the universe in terms of intellec‑ tual understanding rather than scientific method or religious belief. Esoteric cosmology also places “a stronger emphasis on states of existence than most metaphysical cosmologies.”21 By contrast with nature as the cosmos taken as the entire universe, con‑ temporary science understands nature as the universe taken as the “single combined whole” of all the planets, stars, interstellar material, particles, radia‑ tion, etc. that there is.”22 There are however two variants of the idea of nature as the universe. The first is the idea of nature as the entire universe. This however is not different from the idea of nature as cosmos described above in terms of nature

38



Nature and Education

as the whole universe. But the second variant clearly demarcates the sense of nature in its entirety, i. e. the cosmos, from the sense of nature as the entire observable universe only. Nature as the entire observable universe only is “the portion of the entire universe that we can in principle observe.”23 In sum, unlike the everyday informed understanding of the word “cos‑ mos” to denote “the organized structured portion of the universe,” the current scientific understanding of the word “cosmos” denotes all there is, and the word “universe” denotes the entire observable portion of all there is.24 Here, educating persons to live according to nature in the sense of the cosmos or the universe would mean educating them to live according to either all that is observable or all that simply is. But of course such a goal remains unacceptably ambiguous, for no stand is taken on the nature and limits of the sciences as the most reliable guide to acquiring fundamental knowledge of nature. The open question here is whether nature is itself of such a fundamental character that it can be known as a whole through science only or not.

Nature as the Human Milieu The second major change is in our understandings of nature itself not in its most fundamental character but as the most fundamental human milieu. As the very extensive international reflection over the last thirty years on Imamichi Tomonobu’s seminal idea of an “Eco­‑Ethics” has amply demon‑ strated, the milieu in which Europeans and others live is no longer that of what was traditionally understood as “nature” in its usual objective senses.25 Rather, what constitutes that lived milieu today is “the technological con‑ juncture,” the human world newly enlarged by the now globalized intercon‑ nections of communications and information technologies.26 Being at home, living reasonably fulfilled lives in such a novel milieu (what the Greeks called the oikos, and hence “eco”­‑ethics), must mean something other than pursuing only the goals of the Stoic sage. Moreover, for most reflective persons today at least in the European re‑ gions, the “natural milieu” is not just that of the technological conjuncture rather than that of nature in its traditional senses; instead, their natural milieu has become “the environment.” That is, where once the ancient Stoics and the romantic Rousseau could sensibly speak of teaching people how to live according to nature, today many

39

Essay III

would rather speak of teaching people how to live according to a fundamental respect for the environment. In order better to capture this change in perspective recalling several sum‑ mary reflections of the Swedish philosopher Lars Hertzberg proves helpful.27 “Sometime around 1970,” Hertzberg writes, “a shift of perspective oc‑ curred in the mental world of the West. An ecological consciousness arose; the need to protect nature came to have a degree of urgency it never had before – indeed, the very idea of nature as something that could be protected was unheard of … In consequence of the shift of perspective in the 1960’s and the 70’s, environmental movements were formed.”28 Note that the key point here is finally not the historical one of a change in perspective having taken place at certain times and places. The key point rather is a conceptual one, namely that “the very idea of nature” has now substantially changed. For, on previous traditional understandings of nature many of which are still current today, it was inconceivable that nature might need “protection” and that persons could actually be the agents of such pro‑ tection. But we might well ask just what is the fuller character of this change. After alluding briefly to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1960) and the pio‑ neer work by the nutritionist scientist, Georg Borgström’s The Hungry Planet (1972), by way of an initial response Hertzberg calls attention to the now well­‑known expression of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (2006).29 The key expression here, “the end of nature,” according to Hertzberg, “refers to a mental transformation in which nature is no longer perceived as a force independent of human agency. The arena of our actions has changed: while nature used to be the given setting of human strivings, it has during the last decades become an object, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintention‑ al, of our actions. Nature has turned into something that we bear responsi‑ bility for. It is this change of perspective, above all, that constitutes a deep­ ‑reaching change in the mental landscape of the West.”30 Thus, the radical change in perspective on nature is essentially a change in mentality. That is, reflective persons today not only conceive of nature differ‑ ently than traditionally; they also perceive nature differently. And once nature is perceived as an object of human activity that may affect nature itself either positively or negatively, nature now also becomes the object of moral and not just scientific perceptions. Just as with other objects of moral perception such as the ethical charac‑ ter of much human deliberation, so too nature as the object of moral percep‑

40



Nature and Education

tion becomes something for which deliberative human beings may be held to be morally responsible. One may put this point in still larger terms as Herzberg does in calling attention to “two aspects” of the shifting perspective on nature now seen as the environment. Negatively, one may say that the destruction of nature today has become “an existential problem [that is, “our concern to find a home in the world in which we can maintain a sense of meaning”], whereas the destruction of the environment is an instrumental problem. Or, put differently, the con‑ cern for nature is bound up with the meaning of our existence, the concern for the environment with our chances for physical survival.”31 Besides then a first change required in the understandings of nature as the cosmos required in traditional understandings of nature that still underlie many current conceptions of education, a second required change also affects our understanding of nature as the natural human environment. But a third change is required too.

Nature as Human Nature Such a further and for now final change required in traditional understand‑ ings of the nature in nature arises from the extraordinary advances in current understandings of biology in general and human biology in particular. Many of these advances, however, continue to raise a number of philosophical prob‑ lems.32 Human nature in the ordinary sense, as I noted earlier, is the set of “gen‑ eral characteristics and feelings attributed to human beings.” Traditionally, these characteristics and feelings as a whole are ordinarily understood today to be quite general and unchanging.33 And this traditional sense is already on evidence in Stoic reflection. It persists even through most of the scientific revolutions in the seventeenth century into the nineteenth century. Then of course it is mainly Darwin’s work that revolutionizes these traditional under‑ standings of human nature. But Darwin was not alone. For other major figures, the so­‑called “mas‑ ters of suspicion,” namely Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, added to the compli‑ cations that started to appear in ideas concerning a dynamic human nature even as early as Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, to mention but a few.34 Perhaps more important, however, than these philosophical ideas was the scientific culmination of Darwin’s own work several generations ago in the first steps of the evolution and development in modern human biology. This

41

Essay III

movement was the so­‑called “evo­‑devo” movement.35 Today, much of this ear‑ lier work has percolated into contemporary textbooks in human biology and in medicine.36 But it remains largely unclear to what extent informed reflection on how persons today are to be educated so as to be able to adapt successfully to some of the already immense challenges of even the near future have integrat‑ ed these new conceptions of human nature and not merely continued their reflections in the conceptual frameworks of mainly traditional assumptions only. Besides contemporary advances in the scientific understandings of what traditional thinkers referred to as “human nature,” a great deal of ongoing work in philosophical reflection, especially on human consciousness and the person, has also advanced contemporary understanding of what human beings are. Instead, that is, of trying to encompass the distinctiveness of human be‑ ings among other forms of life traditionally in terms of “rationality,” many contemporary thinkers have narrowed their concerns to the nature of con‑ sciousness itself as distinctive of human beings.37 Moreover, especially in con‑ temporary continental traditions of philosophy, some thinkers have focussed on characterizing in more detail the overly general traditional descriptions of human beings as persons. One may very well agree that the nature of persons cannot be satisfac‑ torily considered just as a function of the biology of persons. For, at least on other quite plausible alternative accounts of the nature of persons,38 under‑ standing persons necessarily involves understanding not just the physical life of persons, which is the realm of the natural sciences, but also persons’ mental life. And, arguably, persons’ mental life cannot be reduced exclusively to the proper concerns of the sciences only. On the same account, however, the nature of persons cannot be satis‑ factorily considered either just as a function of any particular “anthropolo‑ gy.” For understanding persons necessarily involves not just understanding the question “what is the person?” in terms of the place of persons in the world, which is the domain of the social sciences. Understanding persons also involves understanding the two further questions, “who is the person?” and “how do persons exist?” which is the domain of a certain kind metaphysics.39 Such a metaphysics sees its general task as the elucidation of the per‑ son neither exclusively as a rational animal nor exclusively as the resultant of certain causal forces. Rather, the metaphysical task on these accounts is to elucidate the person as pre­‑eminently an entity whose unique ways of existing

42



Nature and Education

in the world comprise actions defined by an “originary” freedom prior to and basic for any political, social, or moral activity.40 More particularly, this kind of metaphysics does not attempt to formu‑ late any new definition of the person that might displace the historically cen‑ tral definitions of either a Boethius or of a Kant. Rather it focuses mainly on two objects of philosophical investigation. The first is the person’s “principle of individuation in his ways of under‑ standing himself and his relations with the world.” With respect to this first main of object of philosophical inquiry, this metaphysics focuses its investi‑ gations on the major supposition that the person’s principle of individuation may be properly grasped by means of reflection on what it is in the events of the world, the encounters with other persons, and the transcendence of the divine that ineluctably summons the person to question himself. And the second object of metaphysical investigation is the person’s “’so‑ cial sense’ … that can properly be understood only as a ‘we’ that is neither a simple intersubjectivity nor a dialogue between autonomous agents. With respect to this metaphysical inquiry’s second main object, investigations fo‑ cus on the social sense of the person as, far from any sense of the person as an all powerful, absolutely individual subject who is its own creator,41 a plural “we” that is prior to any social, political, or individual “I.” Such a “we” is even prior to any moral dimension.42 In short, on this alternative view a not improper understanding of the nature of the person is founded neither on natural scientific nor on social scientific inquiry exclusively but also on philosophical reflection. On its own terms this metaphysical account of the person may not unfairly be described as turning fundamentally on a series of what we might call summary basic intuitions. One of the primary summary basic intuitions is that the person is pre­ ‑eminently not “a pure self­‑presence to itself of the reflective subject,” but a promise … the response to a summons.” Another basic intuition here is that the person is “a conscious individual who cannot unify himself solely by his own powers…” And still another is that the unity of the person, “always in movement and always in a situation of departure, is inseparable from the [co­‑ordinate] task of rendering its proper unity [not just to itself but] to the world itself.”43 Of course, summary basic intuitions like these are not uncontroversial. This is an understatement. Still, once worked out in cogent philosophical ar‑ guments, these intuitions make possible understanding the person neither as

43

Essay III

a universal entity nor as a singular entity but as an entity “that individualises itself in universalizing itself and does so by its own free actions.”44 Accordingly, the nature of the human being as a person is not what the etymology suggested to some of its ancient theorists, namely, a static mask. Rather, the person is, as much of the work of the French phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas,45 has tried to show, a dynamic face, an always changing visage.

Envoi: The Nature in Nature The suggestion here then is that some traditional but flawed ideas and beliefs appear to underlie much fractious discussion today of much current reflection on education, for example on an eventually revised common core educational program. These flawed ideas and beliefs may be crystallized around the historical but now inadequate conceptions of the nature of the universe today as a cos‑ mos instead of as an expanding and accelerating universe, of the nature of the human milieu as natural instead of as a globalized technological conjuncture, and of the nature of the human being as a static universal entity instead of as a dynamic metaphysical person. On the bases of at least these tentative remarks here, further philosophi‑ cal inquiry towards a still elusive conceptual consensus about the significance and the meaning of the nature of nature in education seems rather urgent.

44



Nature and Education

Endnotes 1

This essay is a revised version of an invited paper first published as “Education and the Nature in Nature,” in Nature in Education, ed. P. Kemp and S. Frolund (Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2015), pp. 18–30.

2

Diogenes Laertius 1950, Book VII 85, cited in D. Samb, Études du Lexique des Stoïciens (Paris: Harmattan, 2009), p. 113.

3

L. Hertzberg, “Nature is Dead, Long Live the Environment!” Eco­‑Ethica 3 (2014): 75.

4

Throughout this section unless otherwise indicated I follow mainly (but not exclu‑ sively – see the note below on Galen’s dates) the careful although still approximate chronologies of Samb 2009: 119–126. See also Samb’s concise discussion of the major collections of sources on pp. 10–11.

5

To simplify, I have suppressed here the usual indications (“c.” or “ca.”) before al‑ most all of the dates, and I have cited instead without such explicit indications the earliest argued dates of birth and the latest argued dates of death. For example, where Samb’s fuller indications read for Zeno “c.335/332~263/262” and for Chry‑ sippus “c. 281/277~208/204” I have simplified respectively to “335–262” and to “281–204.”

6

In his chronology Samb provides a list of not just these major figures but also of many other Stoic philosophers, their works, travels, and activities.

7

By contrast with the works of the Imperial Stoics, all of the original works of the Early Stoics and many of the works of the Middle Stoics have been lost. Vari‑ ous contents of these works however have been preserved in the works of Cicero, Plutarque, Clement of Alexandria, Galen, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Diogenes Laertius, and Stobaeus (cf. Samb, p. 13 which also includes their dates of birth and death). A list of many of their works can be found in The Stoics Reader, ed. B. Inwood and L. P. Gerson, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), pp. 216–219. Diogenes Laertius 1950, Book VII 85, cited in Samb, p. 113. In writing here about the cardinal notion of “nature” or phusis I rely on Samb, pp. 69–70. Note however the important general observations in the Glossary in Inwood and Gerson: “Na‑ ture (phusis): The meaning of this term is just as wide in Hellenistic thought as it is in Greek philosophy generally. It can refer to nature in general, the specific nature of one object, or one particular object or kind of object; it might in places also be translated as ‘entity’ as in the Epicurean definition of void as an intangible nature” (p. 209). Note the new English translation by P. Mensch and J. Miller, based on the new Greek text of 2013, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (NY: Oxford UP, 2018).

45

Essay III

8

These dates are from S. Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2005) p. 146 and accord with Inwood and Gerson’s dating of Galen’s works to the “second­‑century A.D.” (p. 213) and not with those of Samb who situates Galen’s work in the third century between “218~268 apr. J. C.” (p. 13) and hence before that of Diogenes Laertius.

9

Stoicorum veterum fragmenta II, ed. I. Arnim (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903), 1133. Be‑ sides Samb see G. Lloyd, “Back From the Dead” [Review of Galen, Psychological Writings], TLS [Times Literary Supplement], August 8, 2014, pp. 7–8, and Galen: Three Treatises on the Nature of Science, ed. R. Walzer and M. Frede (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), passim.

10

Seneca 2008, 14; cited in Inwood and Gerson, p. 194. Note that the extant works of Seneca both the prose works and the tragedies have recently been newly translated into English in the now completed seven­‑volume University of Chicago edition under the general editorship of S. Bartsch. See the excellent overview of this and other recent scholarship on Seneca in J. Romm, “A Stoic in Nero’s Court,” The New York Review of Books, 21 December 2017.

11

Chrysippus 2009 in Diogenes Laertius VII 85, cited in Samb, pp. 58–59.

12

Seneca, De vita beata 8, 4, cited in Samb, p. 114.

13

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2007), s. v.

14

Inwood and Gerson, Glossary, p. 207, my emphasis.

15

See Samb, pp. 108–109 where, more specifically, the cosmos is understood as the world in three senses, either as assimilated to god, or as the organization of the world, or finally as the composite of both god and the order of the world. For contemporary notions of the vacuum see F. Close, Nothing (Oxford: OUP, 2009).

16

“Overview: The Hot Big Bang Cosmology,” in “Overview: The Hot Big Bang Cos‑ mology,” in The Oxford Companion to Cosmology, ed. A. Liddle and J. Loveday, (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 1–8.

17

Liddle and Loveday, pp. 81–82.

18

“By the standard cosmological model we refer to the best current theory of the Universe. This means not just the general choice of the hot big bang cosmology (see ‘Overview’), but also the favoured values of the various cosmological parame‑ ters” (Ibid., pp. 282–284). Note that the cosmological parameters mentioned here are “a series of numbers which describe the detailed properties of our Universe…” (Ibid., p. 78).

19

Ibid., p. 82.

46



Nature and Education

20

Loc. cit.

21

Liddle and Lovedale 2008, p. 314.

22

Loc. cit.

23

Note that important philosophical issues arise in the discussion of certain elements in the physics underlying various current physical cosmologies. See for example T. Maudlin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton: PUP, 2012).

24

See his major statement in Tomonobu Imamichi, Eco­‑ethica (Tokyo: Kodansha) tr. J. Wakabayashi, An Introduction to Eco­‑Ethica (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009). The main developments of eco­‑ethics can be followed in the 24 volumes of the annual acts of the International Symposium in Eco­‑Ethics pub‑ lished in the Revue international de philosophie modern (Tokyo: Centre internation‑ al pour l’étude comparée de philosophie et d’esthétique) and in its successor journal, Eco­‑Ethica (Berlin: LIT Verlag, and Charlottesville, VA, Philosophy Documenta‑ tion Center). On the key eco­‑ethical idea of “the technological conjuncture” as the now globalized networks of communication and information technologies see P. McCormick, Eco­‑Ethics and Contemporary Philosophical Reflection: The Technolog‑ ical Conjuncture and Modern Rationality (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008), esp. pp. 153–183, and on the key eco­‑ethical idea of “ethical innovation” see P. McCormick, Eco­‑Ethics and An Ethics of Suffering: Ethical Innovation and the Situation of the Destitute (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008), esp. pp. 64–99.

25

Note that an eco­‑ethics may be considered as a species of an environmental ethics of a metaphysical sort. On the many species of environmental ethics cf. G. Hess, Ethique de la nature (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013).

26

Hertzberg 2014: 75–79.

27

Ibid., p. 75.

28

The books Hertzberg refers to here are G. Borgström, The Hungry Planet: The Modern World at the Edge of Famine (London: MacMillan, 1972), R. Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1962), and B. McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 2006).

29

Hertzberg, p. 76; Hertzberg’s emphasis.

30

Ibid., p. 77; Hertzberg’s emphases.

31

With regard to biology generally see for example P. Godfrey­‑Smith, Philosophy of Biology (Princeton: PUP, 2014). With regard to human biology see for example M. D. Johnson, Human Biology: Concepts and Current Issues, 7th ed. (London: Benjamin Cummings / Pearson, 2013). And with regard to human nature see for

47

Essay III

example J. Prinz, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind (New York: Norton, 2012). 32

Cf. the important work of M. Tomasello, Eine Naturgeschichte des menschlichen Denkens (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2014).

33

See especially J. R. Richards, Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Intro‑ duction (London: Routledge, 2000).

34

Cf. L. Wolpert, Developmental Biology (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

35

See for example M. Langmore and I. Wilkinson, The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (Oxford: OUP, 2014).

36

The general contours of the philosophical issues concerning consciousness can be found Dossier: L’émergence de la conscience, S. Laureys et al., La Recherche, n° 439 (mars, 2010), 40–53.

37

Here, I rely mainly on the French phenomenological accounts of E. Housset on the concept of the person and the history of that concept. See especially E. Hous‑ set, La vocation de la personne: L’histoire du concept de personne de sa naissance augustienne à sa redécouverte (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007), and E. Housset, « La personne en actes, » Etudes, 417/4 (October, 2012).

38

Among the key texts here are the phenomenological works of Scheler, especial‑ ly M. Scheler, The Constitution of the Human Being, tr. J. Cutting (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 2008), and of Husserl, especially E. Husserl, Natur und Geist, ed. M. Weiler (The Hague: Nijhof, 2001).

39

Cf. Housset 2012, ms., pp. 1–3. Hereafter, page references to Housset 2012 are to this manuscript copy which in my own translations. Note that, except in the case of direct quotations, I sometimes modify the sense of Housset’s own views so as to strengthen and thereby accommodate some of my own sympathetic criticisms which, here, remain implicit only.

40

Historically, this understanding is said to go back to Duns Scotus’s voluntaristic understanding of the subject as an entity prescribing for itself both its own purposes and its own laws (cf. Housset 2007).

41

Cf. Ibid., with modifications.

42

Ibid., pp. 6–7.

43

Ibid., pp. 5–6.

44

See E. Levinas, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Writings, ed. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008).

48

Part Two:

B ELIEFS

49

50

Essay IV: Modernities and Beliefs1 “[On the Lockean view] rationality is above all a prop‑ erty of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought.” – Charles Taylor “Those who say that Reason, in Locke, is purely pro‑ cedural, not substantive, cannot have read Book IV.” –Nicholas Wolterstorff

In this essay I return to the strongly influential work of Charles Taylor on the most important cultural context of most work in philosophy today. After Es‑ say One above on modernities and histories I would like now to look critically at Taylor’s treatments of the central topic of modernity and rationality. With a critical view of Taylor’s before us we may then be better able to elucidate our current understandings of the seminal moments in the modern epistemologi‑ cal understandings of knowledge and certainty.

Subjectivation The major development of modern culture has modernism in the arts at its centre.2 Although “many­‑faceted,” Taylor wants to call the movement as a whole “subjectivation.” Subjectivation represents themove away from dif‑ ferent norms and criteria seen as fundamentally independent from human be‑ ings to those that are fundamentally dependent on the choices of individual human subjects. The movement of subjectivation has two major elements – one concerns the content of human action and the other the manner. Yet such a distinction invites confusion because each element can be taken as self­‑referential in the same way. Thus, one can easily incline to the view that, just as the manner in which I effect any one of my actions is necessarily mine in the sense that it

51

Essay IV

cannot but refer to my ways of acting, so too the matter or content of my actions must similarly refer to my goals or aims or whatever. The consequence of holding such a view comes to nothing more than the “rampant subjectivism” that characterizes much of the modernist period.3 And this subjectivism Taylor sees in turn as the root of both “instrumental reason and the ideologies of self­‑centred fulfillment” in so much contempo‑ rary reflection.4 More than one kind of self­‑referentiality is at work in Taylor’s story of modern subjectivism. While granting that the manner of one’s actions indeed refers necessarily to one’s own ways of performing actions, to one’s own aims, desires, aspirations, or whatnot, Taylor argues that the matter of those actions need not. For one may just as well centre the content of one’s actions on matters that owe their significance to something outside or beyond or inde‑ pendent of one’s own interests. So subjectivism represents only one of the two kinds of subjectivation which, however easily confused, are nonetheless different. Taylor goes on to advance a second and more substantial claim, this time not about the two main features of subjectivation but about modern art in general and modernist poetry in particular. Without this distinction, Taylor thinks, one cannot understand either one. “… the two kinds of subjectiva‑ tion have to be distinguished,” he writes, “if we are to understand modern art.”5 And to justify this claim Taylor turns to Rilke, to the very well­‑known opening of the first of the Duino elegies, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ / hierarchies?”6 To understand what Rilke has in mind here in talking of “angels,” one has to see that the meaning of this crucial word, unlike say Milton’s use of the same word, cannot be established by any reference to “certain public‑ ly available orders of meaning” such as “a medieval treatise on the ranks of cherubim and seraphim.”7 For the modernist period characteristically lacks such agreed­‑upon, entirely external, public reference points. Just as Baudelaire wrote about correspondences without anyone in his culture (unlike anyone in the Renaissance era) believing any more in the existence of such things, so too Rilke writes of angels without anyone in his culture, unlike anyone in the medieval period, believing any more in such doctrines. Consequently, in order to understand Rilke’s use of a word like “angels,” one must forego any appeal to strongly external canons. Instead, we must work out the specific details of how Rilke uses this word in the changing con‑ stellations of his own poetic practices. Rilke’s meaning here is most directly

52



Modernities and Beliefs

tied to Rilke’s language and not to the cosmos. Thus, understanding Rilke’s meaning entails understanding his very particular uses of language.8 We may say then that a strong contrast holds between an understanding of an externalist interpretation, one that derives its basic canons from outside a particular human sensibility, and an internalist interpretation, one that does not. This second kind of interpretation is requisite for understanding much modernist poetry including Rilke’s. “Rilke’s ‘order’ can become ours only through being ratified afresh in the sensibility of each new reader. In these circumstances, the very idea that once such an order should be embraced to the exclusion of all the others – a demand that is virtually inescapable in the traditional context – ceases to have any force” (86–87). This distinction between internalist and externalist interpretation can now be linked with an earlier claim of Taylor’s, namely that Rilke’s poetry can be construed paradoxically as a non­‑subjective subjectivism. The poetry is subjective in the sense that it can exhibit a subjectivation of manner. Yet the poetry is not subjective in the sense that it does not entail a subjectivation of matter or content. Indeed, as the “thing poems” in Rilke’s earlier New Poems show, much of Rilke’s poetry is not subjective in content at all.9 The apparent paradox then in the passage from Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, where the poet seems to exhibit at the same time both a subjectivism tout court and a subjectivism that after all is non­‑subjective – this paradox dissolves. The passage is first interpreted internally as exhibiting a subjectivity in manner but not in content. But, while the manner of expression necessarily refers to the subjective sensibility of the poet, the content of these expressions refers, at least partly, to something external to the poet’s sensibility. Correspondingly, the passage is then interpreted externally. The something external we may identify as we see fit, either with the “things” the passage mentions, or “the Earth” which the passage apostrophes, or “the world” in some more elusive sense. The essential point remains that the nature of the epiphany Taylor takes this passage to celebrate is not exclu‑ sively a function of “our action,” but of “a transaction between ourselves and the world” (1989: 482). One final point needs mentioning. The distinction between two kinds of self­‑reference enables Taylor to discriminate within the general modern movement of subjectivation two different species of subjectivism, one closed the other open. More fundamentally however, the present distinction derives from a still larger view. For Taylor thinks that the movement of subjectivation that characterizes modern culture is part of a major shift at the end of the eighteenth­‑century

53

Essay IV

from representation to creation. “The change … here goes back to the end of the eighteenth century,” Taylor writes, “and is related to the shift from an un‑ derstanding of art as mimesis to one that stresses creation. … it concerns what one might call the languages of art, that is, the publicly available reference points that, say, poets and painters can draw on. … But for a couple of centu‑ ries now we have been living in a world in which these points of reference no longer hold for us” (82–83). The movement of subjectivation then is seen as flowing from a prior mo‑ ment when a crucial shift takes place in the accessibility of the major points of reference for attempts to interpret poetry and works of art. More specifically, Taylor wants to interpret modernist poetry, as here in his interpretation of Ril‑ ke’s paradox of subjectivism, with the help of a general view on modern cul‑ ture from the standpoint of what he calls subjectivation. But that movement cannot be understood without making explicit its connection with a radical shift at the end of the eighteenth century, the so­‑called Lockean framework of belief.

From Procedural to Instrumental Rationality What drives this philosophical interpretation of representative modernist po‑ etry like Rilke’s poetry of suffering derives from an antecedent story about the characteristically subjectivist orientation of the modern period. But just when this new story begins is not clear. At times Taylor clearly suggests, as we have just noted, that the modern period begins with the late eighteenth­‑century shift from an aesthetics of rep‑ resentation to one of creativity. This comes to specifying the Romantic era as the starting point for the modern period. But Taylor speaks at other times of the modern period beginning with Cartesian philosophy and science. Here the shift is from late medieval, scholastic views, some of which are still op‑ erative in Descartes’s work, to the early modern views that crystallize in the seventeenth­‑century scientific revolutions. In this case Taylor construes the shift mainly in the epistemological terms of a change in the understanding of reason. At first glance then we seem to have a strong inconsistency in accounting for the emergence of the modern period. But we need to recognize here a cer‑ tain complexity. For Taylor is concerned to specify not just the emergence of any one thing called “the modern period.” As we noted in Essay One, Taylor explicitly rejects any claims to be attempting either historical explanation or intellectual history.10 Rather, he is at work on discriminating different strands

54



Modernities and Beliefs

within the complicated story of modernity. For one of these strands, the Cartesian moment is paramount; for another, the Romantic moment – two strands then and not two stories. In trying to understand just which strand is paramount in these views about the modern period as a movement of a double subjectivation that flows from the end of the eighteenth­‑century, we need to see that late eighteenth century moment itself against the major background of Locke’s philosophy. For implicated in this major strand in the modern period is a particular un‑ derstanding of reason and rationality.11 And this understanding is indissolubly tied to a new notion of the self, “the ungrounded ‘extra­‑worldly’ states of the objectifying subject” (l989: 175). This idea of the self as, in some strong senses, disengaged and separated from the world, is taken to be characteristic of the modern period. For in the modern period the self is understood mainly in just these terms. The shift to the modern then is not to be described in terms of mimesis and creativity. Rather, the shift concerns the nature of reason itself. In particular, the shift is from “the hegemony of reason as a vision of cosmic order to the notion of a disengaged punctual subject exercising instru‑ mental control.”12 This is why Taylor sees the conflation of the manner and matter of subjectivation leading to a reduction of reason to its instrumental and functional capacities only. In other words, instrumental reason is “the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical appli‑ cation of means to a given end.”13 Taylor describes at some length the beginnings of the modern period in the Lockean terms of an emergent understanding of the “punctual self ” and its exercise of reason. The key element in this story is, of course, its continu‑ ity with the “procedural notion of rationality” that Taylor has already linked earlier to Descartes’s notion of a “disengaged subject.” With the shift however from subject to self, a corresponding shift ensues from procedural to instru‑ mental notions of reason and rationality. The question is how to specify the nature of this second shift. Taylor takes the linking of the procedural notion of reason and ratio‑ nality to the disengaged subject as the major result of a converging series of historical studies on the spread of neo­‑Stoical disciplinary ideals to different types of seventeenth­‑century institutions. What these studies have brought into focus “is the growing ideal of a human agent who is able to remake him‑ self by methodical and disciplined action. What this comes to is the ability to take an instrumental stance to one’s given properties, desires, inclinations, tendencies, habits of thought and feeling, so that they can be worked on, do‑

55

Essay IV

ing away with some and strengthening others, until one meets the desired specifications.”14 The notion of the disengaged subject becomes, through the practices of instrumental reason, a procedural self. And this procedural self is the “familiar modern figure” who gains control through progressively objectifying succes‑ sive domains by neutralizing their antecedent normative claims. What comes to define rationality in this picture is the idea of a self that practices cor‑ rect methods or procedures for constructing beliefs and attaining knowledge (162–63). The picture is Lockean. The Lockean picture of reason and rationality, as Taylor wants us to un‑ derstand the matter, is then a radicalization of the Cartesian procedural no‑ tion into an instrumental one. Citing different sections of Locke’s Essay,15 Taylor argues that Locke does far more than simply reject some of the un‑ derlying epistemological assumptions of Cartesian rationalism such as innate ideas. Rather, Locke goes on to articulate a “profoundly anti­‑teleological view of human nature, of both knowledge and morality” (164–65). And he does so largely by carrying out his self­‑described tasks of clearing away, as he writes memorably in “The Epistle to the Reader” in the Essay, “the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge,” of demolition, and, only then, reconstruction. The key to this articulation is Locke’s adoption of an atomistic theory of the mind. Understanding is based upon the “quasi­‑mechanical” process of assembling the inert imprints left on the mind by the senses, “the build‑ ing blocks of simple ideas,” by processes of association into complex ideas. This process enables the independent self to reconstruct a reliable and sound foundation for beliefs. This is the picture of the self refusing to contemplate things but assuming responsibility and authority to construct rational beliefs and knowledge. On this view, Taylor writes, “rationality is above all a property of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought” (168). More specifically, Locke takes rationality as a process of thought in the sense that rationality must be essentially understood from a first­‑person and not from a third­‑person standpoint. The rational self is one that self­ ‑reflexively disengages from “spontaneous beliefs and syntheses, in order to submit them to scrutiny. This is something which in the nature of things each person must do for himself ” (168). So reason and rationality acknowledge no other authority than that of the not just disengaged subject but of the thor‑ oughly independent, objectifying, anti­‑teleological self. This disengagement, moreover, is radically linked to the self­‑reflexivity that issues in self­‑objectification. The self­‑objectification is what allows of the piecemeal yet progressive reformulation of both habits of belief and habits

56



Modernities and Beliefs

of action. And this reformulation in turn leads to a self­‑reformulation that is a self­‑creation, a self­‑identification no longer with habits but with the process of objectification (171). Both belief and action are now articulated with a sharp and unyielding focus not on “relations of natural fact” but on connections that “are deter‑ mined purely instrumentally, by what will bring the best results, pleasure, or happiness” (171). The basic link is thus forged between an idea of the self as a pure “detachable consciousness” existing “nowhere but in this power to fix things as objects” (172), and an idea of reason and rationality that consists not just in the exercise of current procedures but in the instrumental and functional constructions of objectifications. And this is the strand of radical self­‑reflexivity that is woven together with others to initiate, on Taylor’s view, the modern period. Locke will go on to nuance the relations between instrumental and pro‑ cedural understandings of rationality. Two major areas of course are those of morality and natural theology. And much attention needs directing to the con‑ nections between Lockean deism and the development of the Enlightenment. In theology, for example, Locke will not only reject original sin; he will put reason rather than faith at the centre of things. But then Locke will claim that “instrumental rationality, properly conducted, is of the essence of our service of God” (243). Here however the distinctive relation between proce‑ dural and the more radical instrumental rationality we have seen at work in the epistemology is somewhat blurred. Thus Taylor seems to go back on his earlier distinction when he writes in a theological context, “the rationality in question is now procedural: in practical affairs, instrumental; in theoretical, involving the careful, disengaged scrutiny of our ideas and their assembly according to the canons of math‑ ematical deduction, and empirical probability” (243). But this foundation, when taken over into the larger epistemological and metaphysical contexts of Locke’s quarrels with Descartes, is not sharp enough to capture Locke’s rad‑ ical differences with Descartes. To do so we need the idea of a radicalization of the procedural reason of the disengaged Cartesian subject into the instru‑ mental rationality of the autonomous and objectifying Lockean self, “the new stance,” as Taylor himself puts it later on, “which Descartes inaugurates and Locke intensifies” (177). One now apparent gap in this story is the role of Montaigne’s reflections specifying the beginnings of the modern era. Despite his great emphasis on Descartes and Locke, Taylor does not overlook Montaigne. But however dif‑ ferent in their understandings of reason and rationality, Descartes and Locke

57

Essay IV

are for Taylor part of one strand only in the emergence of the modern. And that strand unwinds from their opposition mainly to Platonic and later ver‑ sions of Neo­‑Platonism but also to Aristotelian philosophies. This opposition is what unites Descartes and Locke in their related but different attempts to articulate specific senses of reason’s autonomy from nature and God in an expanded notion of the subject and the self. Despite his similar concerns with subjectivity and the turn inward, Mon‑ taigne is part of a separate strand. For Montaigne needs to be understood as part of the Augustinian world view rather than in opposition to Platonic no‑ tions of form or Aristotelian conceptions of nature. The Greek heritage of Montaigne is new scepticism; but the even greater influence is the Augustinian models of inwardness – a self­‑exploration rather than a disengagement from the self. Montaigne’s is then a different form of self­‑reflexivity than that of either Descartes or of Locke. “Rather than objec‑ tifying our own nature and hence classifying it as irrelevant to our identity,” Taylor writes, “it [this stance of radical reflexivity] consists in exploring what we are in order to establish this identity, because the assumption behind mod‑ ern self­‑exploration is that we don’t already know who we are” (178). Interestingly, Taylor sees this second strand at the origins of the mod‑ ern finding expression in some of Rilke’s work also. For the move to self­ ‑exploration in Montaigne issues in an experience of inner instability, un‑ certainty, and impermanence. And, in turn, this exposure gives rise to “an acceptance of limits.” However different the spirit of this acceptance – in Montaigne’s case Christian and Epicurean, in Rilke’s perhaps neo­‑Lucretian and almost pagan – Taylor interprets passages from Rilke’s Second Elegy about the figures on the Attic gravestones in the terms of such an acceptance. “Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos. These self­‑mastered figures know: “We can go this far, this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us. But that is the gods’ affair.”16

Nevertheless, the spirit of Montaigne’s self­‑exploration differs strongly from that of the self­‑disengagement of Descartes and Locke. Taylor sees this difference as one of both aim and method. For, unlike Descartes’s, the aim of Montaigne’s self­‑exploration is “to identify the in‑ dividual in his or her unrepeatable difference, where Cartesianism gives us a science of the subject in its general essence; and it proceeds by a critique of first­‑person self­‑interpretations, rather than by proof of impersonal reason‑

58



Modernities and Beliefs

ing… its aim is not to find an intellectual order by which things in general can be surveyed, but rather to find the modes of expression which will allow the particular not to be overlooked” (182). The one strand at the beginning of the modern then is, as we have seen, one of radical disengagement; the other, and very different, strand in Mon‑ taigne is one, just as radical, of “engagement in our particularity.” Thus, without slighting Montaigne’s role at the outset of the modern era, Taylor insists on emphasizing the other strand of “radical reflexivity,” the strand of disengagement of the subject in Descartes and the atomization of the self in Locke. For this is the strand that gives major form to both the in‑ choative modern ideas of reason and rationality.

The Modern Origins and the Transformation of the Self This detailed story of the emergence of the modern era in Locke’s transforma‑ tions of the Cartesian idea of a disengaged subject whose rationality is mainly procedural to a punctual self whose rationality is mainly instrumental is not the only story contemporary philosophers have developed. Indeed, Taylor’s own view is controversial. Consider a recent, largely implicit critique of Tay‑ lor’s picture and especially the alternative picture of the origins of modernity that generates this critique. In “Tradition, Insight and Constraint,” his 1992 Presidential Address to the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association,17 Nicholas Wolterstorff carried several steps further a reading of the origins of the mod‑ ern era on which he had been at work for some years. The basis of this reading is an argued rejection of Hegel’s understanding of the genesis of moderni‑ ty. And Hegel’s view, when filtered through the work of Max Weber on the transformation of a religious view of the world into a disenchantment from which both strongly differentiated social and cultural spheres have emerged,18 is Taylor’s inspiration for construing the origins of the modern in terms of a transformation in the notion of the self. Taylor’s own earlier works on Hegel, Wolterstorff thinks, strongly sup‑ port this genealogy. For there Taylor first expounds Hegel’s ideas, especially in the Philosophy of Right and Lectures on the History of Philosophy, that the “modernity” of modern philosophy is to be understood in terms of the central role of subjectivity in modern philosophy. And this role is inaugurated in Des‑ cartes’s articulation of a new conception of the subject that breaks with the previous era.19 Taylor centres this Hegelian story on the idea that Descartes’s new subject is best understood not with respect to the putative connections

59

Essay IV

between the subject and an external cosmic order, but as a “self­‑defining sub‑ ject.”20 Descartes’s cogito thus conceals a radically new idea of the self as inde‑ pendent of any connection with the freshly discovered causal contingencies of the cosmic order, the modern self as self­‑defining subject. And, as we have already seen, it is this construal of the Cartesian self­‑defining subject with its associated ideas of reason and rationality that, according to Taylor if not He‑ gel, Locke radicalizes as a punctual self incorporating not just procedural but instrumental notions of reason and rationality. Now Wolterstorff concedes that taking the critical measure of the many complexities in such a story, only summarized here very briefly, would in‑ volve a very extended discussion. In his later comments he confines himself to indicating one major line of argument only. Wolterstorff thinks Taylor “has lumped together two quite different ideas in his notion of the self­‑defining subject. One is the idea of the will as central to the self, the other is the idea of the self as autonomous” (55). Wolterstorff objects here not to the idea that subjectivity is characteristic of both societies in the modern era and the modern philosophies which to some degree are their reflections. Rather, he contests Taylor’s Hegelian view that, since this philosophical shift occurs in Descartes’s work, Descartes’s work marks the origins of the modern. “I submit,” Wolterstorff writes, “that the self was not yet the centre of attention in Descartes’s philosophy, neither the volitional self nor any other… Descartes’s project was the practice and grounding of scientia” (56). When viewed from the perspective of Descartes’s own project, the central work was not, pace Hegel, the Meditations on First Philosophy, especially Medita‑ tion Two, but the Principles of Philosophy. Far from being the crucial figure in the genesis of the modern, Descartes is “a transitional figure” whose proj‑ ect, whatever features we now take as modern, was not distinctively modern” (53).21 The basic justification Wolterstorff offers for this unconventional read‑ ing is that the historical, cultural, and theological contexts of Descartes’s era, its pervasive and growing “cultural anxiety” that Wolterstorff sees as marking the beginnings of that era in which we ourselves still live, “goes virtually un‑ acknowledged in Descartes” (53). More specifically, “the fact that these cataclysmic events at the founding of modernity go almost unacknowledged in his philosophy,” Wolterstorff ar‑ gues, “indicates that the project in which he was engaged did not call for their acknowledgement” (53). Thus, very much like Toulmin’s careful reflections

60



Modernities and Beliefs

on the social and theological contexts of the shift from the humanistic revolu‑ tion of the 1580’s to the scientific revolutions of the 1640’s that we considered in Essay One, Wolterstorff insists on making room for history. As the Latin text of his writings with their repetition of the crucial terms shows, Descartes’s project was the construction of scientia by starting “with certitude and by demonstrative inference [to] arrive at certitude” (53). What‑ ever the modern interest in Descartes’s therapy of doubt versus the medieval “dialectical appropriation of the textual tradition” as a way of carrying out the project of scientia, “nothing at all of modernity is reflected in his reason” for recommending this therapy (54). Scientia, its grounding and its construction, remains the centre of Descartes’s project not the doubting subject. The subject as the self, as Wolterstorff sees things, is indeed at the origins of the modern. But these origins are not to be located in Descartes’s phil‑ osophical projects but in those of Locke. “Only when we come to Locke,” Wolterstorff writes, “does the self occupy centre stage” (56). This self however is taken not as the autonomous self but as “the decid‑ ing self,” the deciding subject whose centre is volition not autonomy. “There is not a whiff in Locke of the autonomous self. Of the deciding self, there is much; of the autonomous self, nothing. The reality with which our Reason puts us in touch is a reality laced through with meaning, for it is a reality [for Locke’s Puritan vision] created by God and under the law of God. It is when that conviction decays in philosophers after Locke, that the notion of the self as autonomous emerges” (56). So Wolterstorff contests Taylor’s claims that Descartes’s understanding of the subject marks the beginnings of the modern on the grounds of the nature of rational understanding, its role in Descartes’s philosophical project, and the lack of any intrinsic connection between that philosophical project and its cultural contexts. By contrast, his alternative claim is that Locke’s project arises directly out of the need to fashion a philosophical response to the cultural anxieties of his time. That project places the self at the centre, and construes the self and its attendant conceptions of reason and rationality not, pace Taylor, as auton‑ omous and self­‑defining, but as volitional only. “My case for Locke as the first of the great modern philosophers,” Wol‑ terstorff summarizes, “is based on the claim that he was the first to address himself head on to this anxiety [i. e., “the breaking apart of the moral and reli‑ gious traditions of Europe into warring, partisan fragments”] at the founding of modernity. It is this that made him place the volitional self on centre stage. The growing disenchantment of the world would lead yet later philosophers

61

Essay IV

to make of that volitional self an autonomous self. Only then does the self in modern philosophy become a self­‑defining self ” (57).

Lockean Belief and Substantive Reason Now, if these are the main lines in a recent critique of a contemporary Hege‑ lian reading of the genesis of the modern, what are the salient details of Wolt‑ erstorff ’s own reading of Locke? How does Wolterstorff justify his counter­ ‑claims not so much about Descartes, but about Locke, specifically his claim that Locke not Descartes centrestages the self not as autonomous but as vo‑ litional only?22 Wolterstorff reads Locke’s philosophy as fundamentally responsive to the pervasive “cultural anxiety” of his times.23 This anxiety was the new and widespread incapacity to resolve religious, political, and moral quandaries at a time of radical historical revolutions. And this incapacity itself is seen to fol‑ low from the outspoken disavowal of the efficacy of the medieval dialectical appropriation of both texts and traditions for resolving conflicts of such large extent. Neither individuals nor societies, in Locke’s view, could turn any lon‑ ger to texts and traditions for the resolution of their deepest problems. “The practices which European humanity had cultivated for resolving its moral and religious quandaries,” Wolterstorff writes, “had proved profoundly unsatis‑ factory: the textual tradition was fractured and seen as fractured, and scrip‑ tural interpretation was riven with controversy” (49–50). These were the basic contexts of Locke’s philosophy. In responding to these contexts, Locke inau‑ gurates the modern. The basic issue at stake in the anxieties of the times, as Locke under‑ stood the matter, came to the question of how one was to form one’s most fundamental beliefs in a reliable way for grounding one’s life rationally at a time of such fragmentation and strife when both appeals to tradition and re­‑appropriation of texts were rightly discredited. “How are we to go about forming our beliefs, especially on matters of morality and religion, when the old way has been rendered irrelevant” (45)? Locke’s response was to formu‑ late a philosophical project focussed on “overcoming” the profound cultural anxieties of his own times. That project, on Wolterstorff ’s as well as Taylor’s reading, was essentially epistemological. But, unlike Taylor, Wolterstorff sees the governing idea here as a radically novel “proposal for a new practice of belief­‑formation, a new doxastic practice – not only, though especially, on moral and religious mat‑

62



Modernities and Beliefs

ters” (45). Much more specifically, Locke’s new doxastic practice was a “foun‑ dationalist procedure – for doing one’s best to bring it about, for propositions which one does not know, that one believes them if and if only if they are true” (49). The key to this reading of Locke’s epistemology as a foundationalist pro‑ cedure rather than just a foundationalist criterion for warranting or entitling reliable beliefs is a very sharp focus on Book IV of Locke’s Essay, especially on the end of Book IV. By contrast, in developing his reading of Locke’s “quasi­ ‑mechanistic” epistemology, Taylor relies almost exclusively, as most contem‑ porary philosophers still do, on Book II. For, while referring to “The Epistle,” Book I and even Book IV, Taylor focuses his own account on Book II. But Wolterstorff argues persuasively that the aim of the Essay is to pro‑ vide the details of Locke’s proposal for a new doxastic procedure. And these details, after the endless preparations, Locke provides in Book IV only where he specifies the nature of belief formation and especially its governance. Moreover, these details come at the end of Book IV once Locke has shown that, unlike belief, genuine knowledge is “short and scanty” (cited in W 45). So Locke’s epistemology is not only a response to the cultural anxieties of his times; it is mainly a matter of providing an analysis of procedures for ensuring the proper governance of belief formation rather than an analysis of the nature of knowledge itself. His epistemology thus is mainly a regulative epistemology of belief rather than a descriptive epistemology of knowledge. In Book IV, knowledge while related to belief is very importantly dis‑ tinct from belief. Knowledge is direct awareness of facts. These facts are ideas which are “directly present to the mind.” And the awareness, insight into, and apprehension of the “connection and agreement, or disagreement and repug‑ nancy, among one’s ideas” is knowledge. Belief on the other hand does not consist in directly apprehending facts but in “taking some proposition to be true” (47). Belief may accompany knowledge, but need not. “… belief is often present where knowledge is lack‑ ing. And even when belief does accompany knowledge [this is the normal sit‑ uation], it remains distinct from it. Taking a proposition to be true is distinct from apprehending some fact” (47). Knowledge for Locke remains very limited. And that is because the fa‑ miliar difficulties with his very narrow construal of knowledge – difficulties with memory, for example, which show that some knowledge is of facts of which we are not presently aware – “forces Locke to choose between factual awareness and certitude of belief as definitive of knowledge, and he chooses

63

Essay IV

certitude of belief ” (46). The result is that there are few facts of which we can have knowledge in this sense of certain belief. Consequently, the Cartesian project of scientia is radically circumscribed – “some pure mathematics, some pure ethics, some logic; but no scientia of nature” (46). Yet the compensation for this strictly limited scope of knowl‑ edge is the far larger scope of belief. Thus, for Locke, where we lack knowl‑ edge, as in most of the spheres of life, we are to rely on beliefs. But of course belief has its own difficulties. Wolterstorff summarizes these difficulties succinctly. “Some knowledge, on Locke’s official definition, is awareness of some facts, where there is not fact, there is not knowledge. Belief is not so fortunate. It is true that where there is no proposition, there is no belief. But all too often the proposition believed is false” (47). In these cases Locke thinks we have an obligation to find good reasons for our beliefs, a doxastic obligation. What turns out however as alone capable of making reasons “good reasons” is beyond our capacities–”nobody could possibly, for all her beliefs, do what is necessary to hold them for good rea‑ son.”24 Unable then finally to provide a prima facie criterion for what is to count as having “good reason” to believe a particular proposition, Locke turns in‑ stead to making a proposal for a new way to form one’s beliefs. “Rather than proposing a general criterion of entitled belief,” Wolterstorff holds, “Locke was urging a reform in the doxastic practices of European humanity – a new way of using our indigenous belief­‑forming dispositions. His claim was that following his proposed practice amounts to doing one’s best, for some proposition, to bring it about that one believes it if and only if it is true. And it was his conviction that, for each of us, there are some matters of such high ‘concernment’ that we are obligated to try seriously to do our best” (48). In short, Locke’s response to the cultural anxieties of his times was to propose a radically new picture of which beliefs can be taken as entitled when knowledge is so starkly circumscribed. Wolterstorff takes the cardinal passage in Book IV to be xv.5. This pas‑ sage, which I will cite in a moment in recapitulation, is about the specific nature of this new doxastic practice, of what doing one’s best comes to. The passage can be taken as comprising three rules for mediate (not immediate) beliefs, that is, for doing one’s best in believing a proposition when one does not know the corresponding fact. These rules Wolterstorff calls the rule of evidence, the rule of appraisal, and the rule of proportionality. When applied successively, they run as follows:

64



Modernities and Beliefs

l. The Rule of Evidence. “Acquire evidence for and against the proposition such that each item of evidence is something that one knows and such that the totality is a reliable indicator of theprobability of the proposition.” 2. The Rule of Appraisal. “Examine the evidence one has collected so as to determine its logical force, until one has ‘perceived’ what, on that evidence, is the probability of the proposition.” 3. The Rule of Proportionality. “Adopt a level ofconfidence in the proposi‑ tion which is proportioned to its probability, on that evidence” (49).

These rules are taken as the gist of Locke’s key passage mentioned above which now can be quoted for comparison: “the mind if it will proceed rationally, ought to examine all the grounds of probability, and see how they make more or less, for or against any prob‑ able proposition, before it assents to or dissents from it, and upon a due balancing of the whole, reject, or receive it, with a more or less firm assent, proportionably to the preponderancy of the greater grounds of probability on one side or the other.”

Thus, Locke’s proposal is a foundationalist procedure for arriving at reliable mediate beliefs in matters of high “concernment” to which one is rationally entitled. Or, as we noted in Wolterstorff ’s summary formulation earlier on, a “foundationalist procedure – for doing one’s best to bring it about, for prop‑ ositions which one does not know, that one believes them if and only if they are true” (49).25 This reading of Locke’s understanding of reason is not without serious consequences. For while clearly situating Locke in “that long tradition, begin‑ ning with Plato, of thinking of Reason as a faculty of awareness, of apprehen‑ sion, of insight, of ‘perception,’” Wolterstorff is careful to note that Locke’s conception of the scope of reason and “the ontological status of its objects” is very narrow. But however narrow reason’s scope, reason is more than procedural and instrumental. For, when scrutinized in the contexts of Book IV, reason, as one of the sources of genuine knowledge, allows direct awareness of the appre‑ hension of facts. But, more specifically, the facts reasons apprehends are “the logical relations among propositions” (46). This reading is what enables Wol‑ terstorff to return to the initial quarrels we saw with the Hegel­‑Taylor version of the origins of the modern. Without mentioning Taylor Wolterstorff clearly has him in mind when he states categorically, “those who say that Reason, in Locke, is purely procedural, not substantive, cannot have read Book IV” (46).

65

Essay IV

Substantive Reason and the Obligations of Belief When we review carefully the details of these two competing accounts, we need to distinguish immediately a series of different issues. Moreover, among these different issues we also need to specify just which considerations are most important for our concerns with the emergence in the modern era of a particular understanding of the rational frameworks in which we do philos‑ ophy today. One major issue the accounts address is the origins of the modern era, especially the respective roles of Descartes and Montaigne. The difference was a matter of several generations only, although these generations saw the shift from a humanistic revolution in the work of Montaigne to a scientific one in that of Descartes. Here, the difference is between the philosophical project of Descartes and, again almost two generations later, the philosophical project of Locke. For Taylor the modern era begins with Descartes, for Wolterstorff only with Locke. (In neither case, I would add, is there room for Pascal’s gen‑ eral rationality of probability.) This first issue however comes to something more than simply a disagree‑ ment about where the modern era begins. For, as we have seen, that decision itself seems to be a function of some antecedent notion of what constitutes the modern. For Taylor, what is most characteristic of the modern era is its implication of at least three different strands in the understanding of what it means to be an individual subject, self, or person.26 And since Taylor believes that Descartes disengages the first of these strands, a new understanding of the nature of the subject, he strongly leans to situating the beginning of the modern in Descartes’s philosophy. Wolterstorff however has a different understanding of what character‑ izes the modern, especially under the sign of modern philosophy. For him a philosophy begins to be modern not just when it first polarizes its concerns in terms of the subjective. Rather a philosophy begins to be modern when it articulates its basic philosophical project as a response to both individual and societal anxieties about the reliability of basic beliefs. Since, on Wolterstorff ’s reading, Locke is the first philosopher after the breakdown of the medieval syntheses to structure his philosophical project in just this way, Locke’s philosophy and not Descartes’s is seen to mark the beginnings of the modern. This first issue then comes down to adjudicating a disagreement about the satisfactoriness of two different but equally implicit understandings of the modern.

66



Modernities and Beliefs

But I do not think either Taylor or Wolterstorff has given us the requisite detail to allow of any satisfactory appreciation of why they think of the mod‑ ern in such different terms.27 Nor is it evident that the notion of “the modern” has the same extension for each one. Wolterstorff clearly specifies that he takes “the beginnings of the mod‑ ern” to refer to “the beginnings of modern philosophy.” Taylor is not so ex‑ plicit. At times he seems to take the crucial phrase here in the same narrow sense as Wolterstorff does; more often however he seems to have in mind something that includes philosophy but is broader, namely the beginnings of modern culture. So, even were one to have more detail about their respective qualifications for these different antecedent understandings of “the modern,” actually deciding between the two would not clearly be a matter of deciding between accounts of the same thing. Regardless of these matters, just where we situate the beginning of the modern does not bear directly enough yet on our interests here in under‑ standing more fully the nature of the rational. For whether we take the mod‑ ern era to begin with either Descartes or Locke (or indeed following Toulmin with Montaigne or with someone else), we would still have to specify just which elements of their respective projects are the pertinent ones for eluci‑ dating the background understandings of rational interpretation. So, whatever the respective merits of each of these accounts of the origins of the modern, we have no central interest here in trying to explore the matter far enough in order to judge the issue. A second issue that separates these two accounts however is more in‑ triguing. This issue has to do with how we are to understand Descartes’s phil‑ osophical project. For Taylor, this project turns on a revolutionary construal of the rational subject which finds its canonical formulation in Meditation Two, whereas for Wolterstorff the Cartesian philosophical project turns on refining the late medieval notion of scientia whose canonical formulation is to be found in the Principles. Descartes’s philosophy for Taylor is a new philos‑ ophy of rational subjectivity, whereas for Wolterstorff Descartes’s philosophy is a transitional philosophy of “science.” At first glance then it seems we are being asked to decide between com‑ peting readings of Descartes’s philosophy. The issue we might think comes to the now familiar concerns as to whether we are to read Descartes’s philosophy of science from the perspective of his metaphysical and not just epistemo‑ logical reflections on the cogito, or, conversely, whether we are to read those metaphysical reflections from the perspective of the scientific works and of the mathematics.

67

Essay IV

Here again however I think we need to be circumspect. Wolterstorff writes from a different standpoint than Taylor. Like Taylor, he has a much larger story to tell than just the story of how philosophy develops from the later medieval period through the Renaissance and into the onset of the seventeenth­‑century scientific revolution. For he carries his story beyond Descartes and Locke to Hume and then on to both Kant and especially Reid before he takes up Taylor’s affinities for Hegel (cf. 50–52). More importantly, as he writes Wolterstorff has Taylor’s story before him. Yet Wolterstorff ’s own larger story, while independent of Taylor’s ac‑ count (cf. his earlier work), partly depends on a protracted critique of Tay‑ lor’s reading of Descartes. In this sense Wolterstorff is offering an alternative account of Descartes to the one already before us, namely Taylor’s. And of course behind Taylor’s reading – and this is part of the great interest in the contrast – is Hegel’s reading. This peculiar asymmetry I think explains in part some of the differenc‑ es between these two accounts of Descartes. That difference is more finely­ ‑grained than just where one’s reading of Descartes is to start, whether from the mathematical or from the metaphysical. Rather, the distinction is between Wolterstorff ’s attempts to characterize the rationality of a philosophical proj‑ ect of Descartes (as he does with Locke) and then judge whether the project exhibits what he takes to be characteristic of modernity, and Taylor’s attempt to highlight the new construal of rationality as one only of several salient fea‑ tures of Descartes’s philosophical work. When viewed from the standpoint of his philosophical project, Des‑ cartes’s philosophy shows both strong continuities and strong discontinuities with later medieval notions of philosophy’s task as scientific. To confirm this point we need only underline such central terms in Descartes’s Latin writings as “idea.” But when viewed from the standpoint of Descartes’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of the cogito, then Descartes’s work as opposed to his philosophical project shows a striking and perhaps revolutionary inno‑ vation in what was initially an Augustinian theme of inwardness which then filtered through Montaigne’s neo­‑Stoical humanism. This move does not reconcile the two readings, nor does it try. What is of concern rather is to see more clearly what is the issue that separates these two different readings of Descartes. In the light of this recognition that Taylor and Wolterstorff are reading from different standpoints, I think we can now see that the focus has to be sharpened if we are to appreciate the differences intelligently enough.

68



Modernities and Beliefs

Regardless then of whether there are compelling philosophical arguments available for preferring one standpoint on Descartes’s philosophy to another, we have the more specific question of whether Wolterstorff has gotten the description of Descartes’s philosophical project historically and conceptually right, and whether Taylor has gotten the description of Descartes’s notion of the subject right. Just here it seems to me is where the discussion comes together. For by reason of his commenting on Taylor Wolterstorff moves to Taylor’s own cho‑ sen ground of the cogito and challenges Taylor’s reading of the cogito. So the issue now seems to be whether Taylor’s construal of the cogito as comprising a distinctively novel (if not modern) understanding of the rational subject as self­‑defining and in that sense autonomous squares with both Descartes’s writings and the conceptual implication of his central claims about the strictly rational nature of the cogito. Yet Wolterstorff does not address this issue as directly as he should. For, while agreeing that “the self in general, and the deciding self in particular, was moved to the centre of attention in early modern philosophy,” he goes on to assert, without direct argument, that “the self was not yet the centre of atten‑ tion in Descartes’s philosophy, neither the volitional self nor any other” (56). And of course this leaves Taylor free to underline his concern with the rational subject rather than the self, and indeed with Descartes’s cogito as implying substantive claims about the subject’s definition of itself as in at least some sense from its place in a network of orderly cosmic relations. The second issue then, in a similar but different way to the first, is not joined. And once again there can be no rush to judgment on the “correctness” of the respective accounts of Descartes. Besides the first issue of where we are to situate the beginnings of the modern and this second issue of whether Descartes philosophical work if not his project inaugurates in the metaphysics of the cogito a revolutionary understanding of the rational subject as self­‑defining, a third issue needs at‑ tention. This issue turns on the details, not of Descartes’s modernity or his theme of rational subjectivity, but of Wolterstorff ’s apparent counter­‑claim that “only when we come to Locke does the self occupy centre stage,” not the autonomous self but the deciding self, “the idea of the will as central to the self ” (56; 55). Suppose then in the light of the considerations that have surfaced in dis‑ cussing the first two issues, we set aside the historical claim here that in early modern philosophy the self first comes to centre stage in Locke’s philosophy. Whether or not this is the case – and we would certainly have to scrutinize

69

Essay IV

the implicit distinctions all along between subject and self – we need not in‑ vestigate. For what is more important is the complex second claim that the self in question here is not the autonomous self but the deciding self. And specifi‑ cally what holds our attention is not the fate of the autonomous self and just where historically that notion arises. Rather, the key idea here is the construal of the deciding self as a self in which the central component is the will, what Wolterstorff also calls “the volitional self ” (57). One important feature of this idea is that it arises in the course of Wolt‑ erstorff ’s development of his alternate account of the origins of the modern. There is no direct engagement here however with Taylor’s reading of Locke. For Taylor’s reading, as Wolterstorff points out repeatedly, centers on Book II of the Essay where Locke’s accent falls strongly on the nature of knowledge rather than on Book IV where the accent falls on belief. And while Wolter‑ storff certainly wants to reject Taylor’s construal of the Lockean self as mainly a punctual self that includes a creating self­‑defining autonomy, he nevertheless is much more interested in detailing his own reading of just what the Lockean volitional self comprises. Rather than directly opposing to Taylor’s picture of a Lockean punctual self his own sketch of a Lockean volitional self, Wolterstorff is at some pains to show exactly where the volitional self fits in his understanding of Locke’s philosophical proposal to institute a new doxastic practice. We recall that Wolterstorff takes Locke as “urging the institution of a new doxastic practice” rather than “proposing a criterion of entitled belief ” (48). What needs underlining here however is not the idea of a doxastic prac‑ tice whose successive steps require careful formulation in terms of procedural rules, but the associated idea of a doxastic obligation. This notion can be seen at work in a passage from Book IV that Wolterstorff cites. “He that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due his maker, who would have him use those discerning faculties he has given him, to keep him out of mistake and error…“28 The seeking of truth Locke writes of here is one of those matters of high “concernment” human beings have to worry about. So the first point here is the existence of an obligation. But this obligation concerns specifically the truth of certain matters, a truth which requires the use of discernment, a non­ ‑evident truth therefore of which one cannot have certain knowledge in all instances. And hence one which requires the discernment of just which of those among our beliefs are reliable, a discernment of opinion, of judgment,

70



Modernities and Beliefs

of doxa. Thus the obligation here is doxastic obligation. And although these obligations will vary somewhat, Locke certainly reserves a major place for moral and religious matters as well as political and educational ones. Still, what exactly is the nature of this doxastic obligation? As Wolter‑ storff reads Locke, persons have an obligation to go through certain evalu‑ ative procedures for testing, supporting, and ensuring the reliability of just those moderate beliefs that are central to the issues of “concernment.” Locke believes, we remember Wolterstorff asserting, that “for each of us there are certain issues of such ‘concernment’ … as to place us under obligation to try seriously to do our best to bring it about that our beliefs conform with the facts on those issues” (48). What the doxastic practice comes to is an explic‑ itation, such as Wolterstorff ’s three rules, of “doing our best.” The doxastic obligation concerns the other of the two major components here, the “trying seriously.” This serious trying, I think, is where the idea of the rational self comes in as volitional, as having at its core the notion of the will, as deciding. For Locke’s doxastic obligation of its nature requires a response. And that re‑ sponse for Locke has to be a matter of the person “trying seriously,” that is to say both wanting reliable beliefs and deciding to secure them. What is striking of course is that this wanting and deciding comes to con‑ stitute the very nature of the Lockean self. But this claim, whatever its merits, remains independent of the prior claim that the doxastic practices Locke’s philosophical project is designed to elaborate and institutionalize themselves derive from doxastic obligations. These in turn make sense for Locke – given his antecedent Puritan con‑ victions about the existence of God, the nature of creation, the obedience human beings owe to their creator, etc. – only on the assumption that part of what it means to be a rational person in such a context entails wanting and deciding on the securing of reliable beliefs about high matters of “concern‑ ment.” In this light we might then construe the third issue that emerges from the confrontation of two related but very different accounts of the origins of the modern as whether indeed there is a difference between Wolterstorff ’s notion of the Lockean self as primarily a volitional self and Taylor’s notion of the Lockean punctual self as a self­‑deciding­‑subject. This may be a distinction without a difference. We see the room for dif‑ ferent emphases here – is the Lockean ego mainly a self or a subject? But does Taylor stress the “deciding” element in his expression “self­‑deciding­‑subject” enough to bring the expression’s significance close enough to Wolterstorff ’s

71

Essay IV

talk of a “volitional self ”? If so, then where exactly is the issue? If not, then granted the difference; but then, how interesting is this difference philosoph‑ ically? Whether we choose to pursue these matters or not, the third issue here about the links between the nature of the rational self, the putative existence of doxastic obligations, and the procedures of doxastic practice bring us to the most important issue for our concerns with the nature of rational inter‑ pretation in the modern era. That issue turns on the connections between the understanding of reason at work in the details of a Lockean doxastic practice such as Wolterstorff has expanded them, and the understanding of reason at work in the Lockean account of knowledge such as Taylor works out. We recall Wolterstorff ’s earlier expostulations: “Those who say that Reason, in Locke, is purely procedural, not substantive, cannot have read Book IV” (46). I turn to this matter in the next and concluding section.

Rationality and Interpretation Besides the three issues we have been looking at so far, a fourth and central issue between Taylor and Wolterstorff concerns the nature of reason and ra‑ tionality at the beginnings of the modern era. Initially, this issue might be put in the form of a question. Given the radically influential role of early modern reflection on the development of Enlightenment, Romantic, and late modern understandings of interpretation, what are the central connections in that re‑ flection among reason, rationality, and interpretation? More specifically, how is reason to be understood inside the revolutionary Lockean framework of belief? Very generally, Taylor thinks that the movement of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the early modern era involves a gradual and thorough­ ‑going change in the understanding of reason. Thus, were we to focus these matters temporarily on one theme only such as the theme of “self­‑control,” Taylor thinks that we would find “a very profound trans­‑mutation, all the way from the hegemony of reason as a vision of cosmic order to the notion of a punctual disengaged subject exercising instrumental control” (l989: 174). The important point to underline in this general view is the opposition be‑ tween reason as a vision and reason as a procedure. Taylor goes on to make these general comments more specific. Thus he reminds us that for both Plato and the Stoics neither introspection nor self­ ‑examination were important for understanding the cosmos and human goals. The classical ideal was rather a matter of taking reason as “the crucial capacity

72



Modernities and Beliefs

… of seeing the order – in the cosmos (for Plato) or in the priority of human goals (for the Stoics)” (174). The modern ideal in Descartes and especially in Locke, according to Taylor, is completely different. For reason is to be understood as a capaci‑ ty for “disengagement and objectification.” And this capacity requires both self­‑examination and introspection. “The modern ideal,” Taylor writes, “… requires a reflexive stance. We have to turn inward and become aware of our own activity and of the processes which form us. We have to take charge of constructing our own representation of the world … we have to take charge of the processes by which associations form and shape our character and out‑ look” (174–75). So a modern ideal of reason as reflexively constructing an order through disengagement and objectification is opposed to a classical ideal of reason as non­‑reflexively seeing an order through focus on the essence and the sub‑ stance of things. Where reason on the one model provided access to the way things are, on the other reason is preeminently an instrument, a set of proce‑ dures, at the service of a disengaged self. Taylor’s contrast between the classical and the modern centers on his extended discussions of Locke’s epistemology. We recall that Taylor describes that epistemology largely although not exclusively in terms taken from Book II of the Essay. There Locke proposes that knowledge be understood in the contexts of a radically new picture of the mind. This picture makes room for neither the essences and the forms of things nor for innate ideas of reason. Rather, the Lockean picture is to be taken as a reified and quasi­‑mechanistic portrait of the most fundamental atoms or elements of mind. These elements are the simple ideas which are the residue of the senses’ “quasi­‑mechanical” impact on the mind. In turn, out of these simple ideas complex ideas are then constructed again by a process of association understood in quasi­‑mechanical terms (167). The result is a construction that provides a new and reliable representation of both the world and ourselves to replace the old and unreliable traditional representations. The key characteristic of this process, as Taylor expands it, is the inde‑ pendent, self­‑responsible nature of reason, “a notion of reason as free from es‑ tablished custom and locally dominant authority” (167). And although Taylor is careful to reserve a place for mathematical truths, deductive knowledge, and even the rules of “probable evidence” in Book IV, he characterizes the nature of reason mainly in the contexts of the atomistic and mechanistic account he describes Locke developing in Book II.

73

Essay IV

Taylor now identifies this Lockean picture as “the modern conception of reason.” And he summarizes his understanding of this conception with the expression “reason is procedural” (168). Reason is procedural in the sense that it is neither a seeing nor a completing of any independent order of things. Procedural reason is rather a construction of “a picture of things following the canon of rational thinking.” Locke takes these canons differently from Descartes. Yet for Taylor Des‑ cartes shares with Locke the modern conviction that following some such procedures of reason is the most reliable way of getting as close as we can to the way things are. Reason then is construction on the basis of detailed can‑ ons and procedures for the processes of thinking. A central property of these processes is rationality. “Rationality is above all a property of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought” (168). But, on Taylor’s view, what exactly do these thinking processes com‑ prise besides the following of certain canons and procedures? These processes comprise a “radically reflexive” procedure that “essentially involves the first­ ‑person standpoint. It involves,” as we noted earlier, “disengaging from my own spontaneous beliefs and syntheses in order to submit them to scrutiny” (168). Moreover, these thinking processes also comprise the particular con‑ straint that they must be carried through independently in the sense of being carried through “radically and intransigently exclusive of authority” (168). Finally, the aim of these thinking processes is, as we have seen, to construct and to remake our fundamental representations, but to do so in such a way that the central connections among our ideas “are determined purely instru‑ mentally, by what will bring the best results, pleasure, or happiness” (171). In short, Taylor takes the modern understanding of both reason and rationality to arise, whatever the role of Descartes, mainly from Locke’s articulation of reason as pre­‑eminently procedural, instrumental, and non­ ‑substantive. And, as we have already noted briefly, Wolterstorff disagrees. The question now comes to what exactly is the disagreement about? I think the disagreement is about whether reason and rationality at the beginnings of the modern era are in any way “substantive.” Taylor says no, Wolterstorff says yes. But do they disagree about the same thing? To answer this question I do not think that we have to mount a major study of all the nu‑ ances that make up the somewhat different Lockean accounts of knowledge and belief in Books II and IV. Rather we need to specify the role of reason in the different spheres of knowledge.

74



Modernities and Beliefs

Both Taylor and Wolterstorff, I take it, share the view that reason is “sub‑ stantive” in the domain of our knowledge of some logical relations, of math‑ ematical truths, and of deductive truths. For in these different realms Locke thinks that reason can be based upon direct awareness. Reason here, as Wol‑ terstorff writes, is a faculty of direct awareness, “of apprehension, of insight, of ‘perception’” (46). So, despite appearances, when Wolterstorff goes on to assert very strong‑ ly that “those who say that Reason, in Locke, is purely procedural, not sub‑ stantive, cannot have read Book IV,” I don’t think either he or we should include Taylor. For while insisting on the pre­‑eminently procedural character of Lockean reason, Taylor does not hold that Lockean reason is “purely” pro‑ cedural. This brings us then to the much different – broader, variegated, and dif‑ ficult – domain of belief. On the basis of the close examination we have been conducting here, I think Taylor wants to hold that the practices of thinking in the domain of belief when made explicit show Locke’s understanding of rea‑ son here, if not in the other domains, to be procedural and instrumental. Since however even Wolterstorff agrees that the extent of this domain is very large in Locke’s philosophy as a consequence of construing knowledge so narrowly in terms of immediate direct awareness, one can justify the generalisation that Lockean reason is procedural. Wolterstorff on the other hand is most impressed by two things. First, that even in the initial construals of knowledge in Book IV, knowledge is de‑ fined in terms of both insight and facts. “Let the main point … not be missed,” he writes; “knowledge is insight; knowledge is awareness, or apprehension, of facts” (46). Reason as a faculty for yielding such insight into facts is, at least in this sense, more than procedural; it is substantive. The nature of these facts may of course be controversial. As Wolterstorff remarks, “if Plato were to read Locke’s account of the scope and ontological status of the objects of Reason’s awareness, he would feel profoundly claus‑ trophobic” (46). Still, Locke’s claim is that reason does more than provide procedures for connecting simple ideas instrumentally; reason also provides access to facts. The second point that strikes Wolterstorff is the extent and subtlety of the analyses of doxastic procedure in Book IV. Before he gets to attempting an articulation of just what the rules are for making our beliefs about matters of concernment reliable, however, Wolterstorff acknowledges an important distinction in Locke’s account. The distinction is between immediate and me‑ diate beliefs.

75

Essay IV

Knowledge for Locke, we may remember, is “direct apprehension of facts,” whereas belief is “taking some proposition to be true” (47). A belief is immediate when one takes some proposition to be true on the basis of the accompanying direct apprehension of the fact that corresponds to the prop‑ osition; otherwise, the belief is mediate. Locke’s proposal of a new doxastic practice is a way of discharging one’s doxastic obligation to attend to those cases only where beliefs are mediate; these are cases where either belief does not accompany knowledge, or where “the proposition believed is false” (47). So in those cases where belief does accompany knowledge and where be‑ lief is immediate I don’t think Taylor can have any quarrel with including these cases among the others as instances being more than just procedural. For, just as in the cases of our knowledge of logical truths, mathematical truths, and deductive conclusions, so too here, reason is substantive. Reason in each case is a faculty which yields insight into facts. We arrive then at the nub of the disagreement – the Lockean conception of reason in the most extensive and important cases of establishing the reli‑ ability of one’s mediate beliefs about matters of high concernment. And here, once again on the evidence of the extensive details in Wolterstorff ’s account of Locke’s new doxastic practice, I think we have to conclude that reason is more than procedural and instrumental. It is true that Locke explicitly says that “the mind if it will proceed ra‑ tionally, ought to examine all the grounds of probability…” (IV.iv.5). And Wolterstorff himself talks about unravelling “the practice Locke has in mind into three rules to be applied in succession” (49). But, as his formulation of the rules of evidence, appraisal, and proportionality explicitly shows, two of these formulations involve knowledge. “Acquire evidence … such that each item of evidence is something that one knows…” And “examine the evidence … until one has ‘perceived’…” (49). Thus we have a foundationalist procedure. But this procedure is clearly directed to establishing “for propositions which one does not know, that one believes them if and only if they are true” (49). Reason then as the faculty that enables us to arrive at this knowledge, through the practices of this new dox‑ astic procedure, is certainly procedural and instrumental in the case of mediate beliefs. But reason is also much more – Lockean reason is also substantive. More generally, we may conclude by saying that the understanding of rationality at the beginnings of the modern era cannot be construed as pro‑ cedural and instrumental only. Rather, reflection on the complicated issues at stake in two contrasting accounts of the origins of the modern shows that an

76



Modernities and Beliefs

understanding of reason as substantive is just as much part of the origin of the modern as an understanding of reason as instrumental and procedural.

Envoi: Reason, Knowledge, and Belief Construing rationality in the modern period then in the overly narrow terms of procedural reason is unjustified. To the contrary. Our working understand‑ ing of rationality today needs to retrieve the genuine role of a substantive construal of reason if it is to merit any thoughtful claim on the nature of modern interpretation. And that substantive construal must make new room for a much more nuanced account of the complex relations holding between reason, knowledge, and belief.

77

Essay IV

Endnotes 1

This essay is a revised version of an article that first appeared in Eletheria 3 (1991); 2–15.

2

See C. Taylor, The Ethics of Ambiguity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), Chap‑ ter Eight, “Subtler Languages,” pp. 81–91. Some of Taylor’s more recent thoughts can be found in his replies to a series of critical papers about his various positions. See J. Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). See also Taylor’s recent papers, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), esp. pp. vii–xii.

3

C. Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard UP, 1989), p. 491.

4

Taylor 1992, p. 90.

5

Taylor 1992, p. 89.

6

Rilke, p. 151.

7

Taylor 1992, p. 84.

8

“What could never be recovered,” Taylor summarizes, “is the public understand‑ ing that angels are part of a human­‑independent ontic order, having their angelic natures quite independently of human articulation, and hence accessible through languages of disruption (theology, philosophy) that are not at all those of articu‑ lated sensibility” (p. 89).

9

Relying on studies of Romantic poetry, Taylor summarizes his general view here in a phrase: “where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning, it now has to consist in a language of articulated sensibility” (84). For Rilke’s New Poems from 1907 and 1908 see the translations by E. Snow in two volumes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984 and 1987 respectively). See also the less familiar but closely related poems from 1899 to 1906 in Rilke’s The Book of Images, tr. E. Snow, revised edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1994).

10

Cf. Taylor 1989, pp. 202, 305.

11

Cf. however the very different story of Locke on rationality in for example E. J. Lowe, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd ed. (London: Rout‑ ledge, 2013), esp. pp. 180–184.

12

Taylor 1989, p. 174.

13

Taylor 1992, p. 5.

78



Modernities and Beliefs

14

Taylor 1989, pp. 159–160.

15

The standard modern edition is that of P. H. Nidditch in The Clarendon Edition of Locke’s Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) based on Locke’s own fourth edition of 1700.

16

Rilke, pp. 158–61; cited in Taylor 1989, p. 346.

17

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 66 (November 1992), 43– 57. Cf. Wolterstorff ’s distinction between Locke’s “descriptive epistemology” of knowledge and his “regulative epistemology” of belief in his “Lockean Philosophy of Religion,” in V. Chappell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 184–5.

18

Wolterstorff, pp. 55–57.

19

Cf. Wolterstorff ’s citations from Hegel, p. 55.

20

See Taylor 1989, p. 6; cited in Wolterstorff, p. 55. Further references in the text are to the Wolterstorff article.

21

The point may be ironic when we recall the similar strategy Taylor adopted with respect to Montaigne.

22

See especially N. Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 227–246, and his Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 261–266.

23

On Locke’s own times see for example R. Woolhouse’s excellent biography, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).

24

Wolterstorff, p. 47; cf. Locke, Book IV. xx. 2.

25

Wolterstorff has modified his formulations of these rules in the 1994 paper I cited in note 19. There he speaks of “four principles” rather than of “three rules.” For the sake of comparison, the “four principles” read as follows: “Principle of Immediate Belief: One is to believe something immediately only if it is certain for one–that is, only if one knows it” (p. 182). “Principle of Evidence: One is not to believe something mediately until one has acquired evidence for it such that each item of evidence is something that one knows and such that the totality of one’s evidence is satisfactory” (p. 183). “Principle of Appraisal: One is not to believe some proposition mediately until, having satisfactory evidence, one has examined that evidence to de‑

79

Essay IV

termine its logical force and one has ‘seen’ what, on that evidence, is the probability of the proposition” (p. 183). “Principle of Proportionality: Having determined the probability, on one’s satisfactory evidence, of the proposition in question, one ought to adopt a level of confidence in it which is proportioned to its probability, on that evidence” (p. 184). 26

Taylor 1989, pp. 177–78, 185, 305, 308.

27

The kind of detail I have in mind can be found for example in the superb two­ ‑volume work of M. R. Ayers, Locke, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1991), and in N. Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought (Oxford: OUP, 1999). See also the six collections on Locke’s philosophy published between 1997 and 1992 and the reg‑ ular issues of Locke Studies.

28

Locke, Book IV, xvii, 24; cited in Wolterstorff, p. 47.

80

Essay V: Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics1 “… we shall always suppose some such principal ray moving along with the eye, and tracing out the parts of every form, we mean to examine in the most perfect manner: and when we would follow with exactness the course anybody takes, that is in motion, this ray is always to be supposed to move with the body. In this manner of attending to forms, they will be found whether at rest, or in motion, to give movement to this imaginary ray; or, more properly speaking, to the eye itself, affecting it thereby more or less pleasingly, according to their dif‑ ferent shapes and motions.” .

– Edmund Burke2 “Structure, organism, movement were felt to be all in‑ separable aspects of a single reality, which could further be grasped in terms of variety, intricacy, and simplifica‑ tion … The search for form was a search into form, in which the relation of the active intellect and the object became a sort of ‘chace,’ and sensuous pleasure was an integral part of the act of grasping the form, defining, and enjoying it. In turn the quest for the inner struc‑ ture, the wholeness, of a form was linked with the quest for inner meanings, for full human comprehension of all that was involved in a character, a sense, a group of per‑ sons. Here it was the use of emblems, of symbolic over‑ tones and undertones, coming into play, with a highly complex working out.”

– Joseph Burke3 At the beginnings of both Parts One and Two we have recalled some of the most important conceptual frameworks for understanding better the mod‑ ernist backgrounds for ongoing philosophical work today. Central to those

81

Essay V

backgrounds is the extraordinary development of critical reflection on the aesthetics and the arts.4 In this essay I would like to look critically at an in‑ structive example of that reflection.

Analyzing Beauty In his 1753 The Analysis of Beauty William Hogarth tried to stabilize the shift‑ ing understanding of taste in his transitional age. His approach was to show how representing beauty in a painting required a new understanding of beauty not as taste but as “fitness.”5 And representing fitness involved not the passive imitation of artistic precedents. Rather, it involved the active perceptual par‑ ticipation of the painterly eye in the interpretation of the variety, movement, and intricacy of the structured and vital organic forms of the natural world. For Hogarth, really to see objects is not to copy in a linear way the static forms left upon the merely receptive perceptual processes by nature’s uni‑ formity. Really to see objects is to read in a nonlinear way the dynamic for‑ mal interactions between the variety within nature’s uniformities and what he memorably called the “wanton” exigencies of visual perception for active composition. The consequences of such innovative views were of central importance in the development of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics. Thus, one scholar writes that Hogarth’s new active relation of life and art necessitated the rejection of all the old (aristocratic) systems of art values or patronage, the creation of a new and broad audience, the search for new ways of getting at this audience; and at the same time the creation of new methods of art teaching, with the rejection of all kinds of ‘copying.’6 The new kind of selfconsciousness produced by the stress on movement and on participation, on a new relation to the audience, was linked with a cor‑ relation of art and theatre. Here the baroque concept of a cosmic theatre was given a realistic focus, in which Hogarth was helped by his response to The Beggar’s Opera. His social criticism was given force by the notion of everyone acting a role, pretending to be other than his real or natural self; drama con‑ sisted of the conflict between the real self and the imposed role through which men betrayed and destroyed themselves. Whatever qualifications we may want to formulate about such a summa‑ ry view of Hogarth – and they are many7 – this view nonetheless suggests at least two related points I would like to explore here further. The first point is historical and negative – Hogarth’s Analysis is one of the still neglected cru‑ cial documents in the development of English eighteenth­‑century aesthetics

82



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

and the conceptual backgrounds of modernity.8 And the second is systematic and positive – Hogarth’s analysis of beauty in terms of nonlinear interactions between dynamically structured natural forms and the interpretive composi‑ tions of visual perception is a still overlooked central account in what may be called modernity’s realisms in Hogarth’s aesthetics. Accordingly, in what follows I try to show how neither of two still influ‑ ential readings today of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics make sufficient room for Hogarth’s innovations. The result in each case is a distorted picture of the movement of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics.9 After a sketch of each of these readings I introduce a positive discus‑ sion of several of the peculiar conceptual resources Hogarth’s analysis still reserves for those who would explore an alternative account of eighteenth­ ‑century aesthetics, one anchored in the innovations of Hogarth’s peculiar version of an empirical realism.10 Finally I suggest the philosophical interest of construing a key element of Hogarth’s views in terms of some discussion of intrinsic properties.

Disinterestedness In 1984, in the pages of the most important journal in the field, The Jour‑ nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, a long smoldering dispute flared up once again.11 The general issue had to do with how to understand the conceptual connections between contemporary discussions of art and the aesthetic and the seminal eighteenth­‑century works of such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Addi‑ son, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Gerard, Alison, and Kant. Hogarth was not mentioned. And the particular quarrel was whether a major line of reflection running through the writings of these thinkers was properly characterized as the precursor of modern aesthetic attitude theories or rather as the forerunner of modern preoccupations with taste and other aesthetic predicates. Other questions were also at issue in the 1984 exchange – for example, how to read philosophical classics, how to interpret the sometimes entangled strands of both platonism and empiricism in the eighteenth­‑century, and es‑ pecially how to take the critical measure of Kant’s extraordinary achievements both with respect to the questions of his predecessors and the preoccupa‑ tions of his successors. But the basic quarrel had to do with understanding the eighteenth­‑century’s sustained reflections on art and beauty, either mainly in terms of disinterestedness or mainly in terms of taste. In 1960 Jerome Stolnitz published Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism. The book set out in some detail the lineaments of a modern aesthe-

83

Essay V

tic attitude theory of the arts. Something is to be understood as beautiful, Stolnitz claimed, when it becomes the object of a “disinterested and sym‑ pathetic attention … and contemplation … for its own sake alone» as, for example, «the ‹look of the rock,› the sound of the ocean, the colors in the painting.»12 The key to this view was the notion of “disinterestedness,” a car‑ dinal term in eighteenth­‑century aesthetics. At the time in a much remarked series of articles Stolnitz went on to offer a reading of the eighteenth­‑century accounts of disinterestedness. He also suggested their central connections with his own version of twentieth­ ‑century aesthetic attitude theories such as those of Bullough and Vivas. Thus, in “’Beauty’: Some Stages in the History of An Idea,” Stolnitz tried to show how contemporary neglect of the notion of beauty is a direct consequence of “the demotion of ‘beauty’” in the eighteenth­‑century thinkers and their sub‑ stitution for it of the “logically prior” notion of the aesthetic.13 In a second paper, “Of the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterestedness,” Stol‑ nitz then claimed that the concept of disinterestedness was the key to mod‑ ern aesthetic theory. “If any one belief is the common property of modern thought,” he wrote, “it is that a certain mode of attention is indispensable to and distinctive of the perception of beautiful things.”14 This concept Stolnitz took to be the “motive idea” which enabled British eighteenth­‑century think‑ ers to articulate the idea of a general and autonomous philosophical discipline called aesthetic theory. The focus narrowed in the third of the 1961 papers, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory.” There Stolnitz tried to show that “British aesthetics was directed above all to the descriptive anal‑ ysis of aesthetic experience.” The linchpin of his analysis was the notion of aesthetic perception, and the result was the defining of ‘art’ in terms of the attitude of disinterested perception, either in the spectator, e.g. Bell, or trans‑ posed to the mind of the creative artist, e.g. Croce.”15 Stolnitz spelled out the understanding of “disinterestedness” in Shaftes‑ bury’s transitional work. Shaftesbury held that elements of the renaissance, medieval, and ancient views of harmony coexisted in an uneasy opposition with Shaftesbury’s own attempts to articulate the innovative notion of disin‑ terestedness. In the final paper of the series, “Locke and the Categories of Value in Aesthetic Theory,” Stolnitz argued that Shaftesbury’s work was completed in Hutcheson’s argued repudiation of Locke’s understanding of perceiving beautiful things and of beauty as a complex idea.”16 Still, Stolnitz also argued that Hutcheson had stopped short of developing a “phenomenalist analysis”

84



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

of beauty. For Burke managed not just to complete the critique of Locke’s legacy for aesthetics; he transformed the valuecategories of the eighteenth­ ‑century. Burke’s transformation most simply came to the establishing of the notion of aesthetic perception at the center of the experience of art whereby the aesthetic came to displace the beautiful as the cardinal notion of philo‑ sophical reflection on the arts. In short, the movement of eighteenth­‑century thought about the arts from Locke to Kant is, on Stolnitz’s reading, a progressive transformation of the notion of the beautiful to that of disinterestedness. And disinterestedness itself is to be understood as aesthetic perception, the precursor of the modern notion of the aesthetic attitude. Thus the historical roots of the characteris‑ tic note of modern reflection on the arts are to be found in the eighteenth­ ‑century’s gradual articulation of the notion of aesthetic perception culminat‑ ing in Burke’s Enquiry of 1757. Stolnitz’s bold and detailed body of work comprising both a theory of the arts in the 1960 book supported by an historical genealogy of the theory in the four articles between 1961 and 1963 did not go unchallenged. In the his‑ torical sections of his 1971 book, Aesthetics: An Introduction,17 George Dickie proposed an alternative reading of the eighteenth­‑century. Dickie claimed that Stolnitz was wrong in “attributing … aesthetic perception to the eighteenth­‑century British philosophers.”18 He partly qual‑ ified this view by allowing that Stolnitz was right in focussing on disinterest‑ edness as the cardinal notion in the eighteenth­‑century theories and its links with the notion of beauty. But Dickie insisted that, pace modern aesthetic attitude theorists like Stolnitz, no such links held between disinterestedness and perception. Dickie went out of his way to emphasize repeatedly that the crucial theme of the story was the rise of the theory of taste. Each thinker in the eighteenth­‑century was taken to subjectivize beauty while still tying taste to some objective feature in the world. And the appearance of ‘aesthetic’ theories (Dickie’s scare quotes) was taken to be subsequent to the hey­‑day of taste theories: “As the philosophyoftaste approach was abandoned, ‘aesthetic’ the‑ ories began to take hold.”19 Dickie concluded: “before the eighteenth­‑century beauty was a central concept; during the century, it was replaced by the concept of taste; by the end of the century, the concept of taste had been exhausted and the way was open for the concept of the aesthetic.”20 In a second book, Art and the Aesthetic in 1974,21 Dickie claimed that Stolnitz was also wrong in taking both Addison and Alison as aesthetic at‑

85

Essay V

titude theorists. Although asserting that his major concern was to describe the structural differences between aesthetic attitude theories and theories of taste, Dickie argued that the first aesthetic attitude theorists were not the British eighteenth­‑century theorists but certain nineteenth­‑century German thinkers. The basis of this claim was Dickie’s description of what he called the fivepart structure of the theory of taste.22 He then used this idea of a five­‑part structure to criticize Stolnitz’s attributions of aesthetic attitude theories to the British thinkers. After his proposal of a new reading of the eighteenth­‑century British thinkers in Stolnitz’s 1961 to 1963 articles, and its cautious acceptance and then radical challenge in Dickie’s books of 1971 and 1974, the third chapter of this story was not difficult to anticipate. For in a 1978 article, “The Aesthetic Attitude’ in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics,”23 Stolnitz responded to Dickie’s criticisms by formulating his own critique of Dickie’s views as well as a de‑ fense of his own original position. In a 1978 article Stolnitz took sharp aim at both Dickie’s claim that aestheticattitude theories are not stated fully until Schopenhauer and its putative justification by an appeal to the apparently different structures which nineteenth­‑century German theories reveal when compared with the eighteenth­‑century British theories. Specifically, Stolnitz challenged the satisfactoriness of Dickie’s crucial distinction between theories of taste (the British contribution) and aesthetic attitude theories (the German contribution). The point of the challenge was to underline, on Dickie’s own admission, that both theories share the cardinal notion of disinterestedness, and then to demonstrate that the most plausi‑ ble interpretation of that notion “erases the distinction on which Dickie’s argument rests.”24 Stolnitz concluded that “the theory models formulated by Dickie are both raggedly stated and internally inconsistent, and that, further‑ more, they fail to carve at the joints the thought both of the British and of Schopenhauer.”25 This critical discussion brought Dickie to his 1984 view that the major explanation of Stolnitz’s alleged misreadings of the British thinkers as aes‑ thetic attitude theorists was the fact Stolnitz had “not fully understand the nature of the aesthetic attitude theory that he himself holds.”26 Dickie’s rather belated article provoked an immediate rejoinder from Stolnitz. In his half of the 1984 exchange however Dickie had put on record sev‑ eral serious charges which Stolnitz did not address directly in his strongly worded but largely familiar rejoinder. Thus, Dickie’s claim that Stolnitz was wrong in attributing not disinterestedness but disinterested perception to the

86



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

British thinkers was not finally countered. And since Dickie went on to argue that it was precisely the presence or absence of this peculiar understanding of perception which distinguished the two kinds of theories – the British taste theories lacking this component while the German attitude theories incorpo‑ rated it – Stolnitz’s view that Dickie’s was a distinction without a difference remained controversial.27

Aesthetic Attitude, Taste, and Beauty This protracted story of the interpretations of eighteenth­‑century aesthet‑ ics in terms of a progressive elaboration of the understanding of beauty as a consequence of the adoption of an “aesthetic attitude” and its challenge in the details of a theory of taste is not uninstructive. In particular, the early dis‑ cussions from Locke through Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hutcheson remain valuable, and the attention paid to some later eighteenth­‑century theorists is useful. Generally however this story is seriously misleading. For it strongly sug‑ gests that the course of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics culminates in a series of reflections which are said to prefigure twentieth­‑century views, whether aesthetic attitude theories or theories of taste. And yet it fails to document the major upheaval that definitively interrupts such linear and progressive readings. That upheaval, as even a brief, incomplete chronological survey shows, is the mid­‑century rise of an empirical, specifically “realist” strain in aesthetics and literature. This realist strain is adumbrated in both Henry Fielding’s “Preface” to Joseph Andrews (1742), his Essay on the Knowledge and the Characters of Men (1743), and Hogarth’s engravings Characters and Caricatures (1743). It is sketched by the time of Hogarth’s SelfPortrait (1745) and in the chapter on contrasts in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). It is already parodied in Tobias Smollett’s fictional character “Painter Pallet” in the The Adventures of Per‑ egrine Pickle (1751– see chapters 46–50, 67). It is fully articulated in Hoga‑ rth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), translated into German and noticed by Lessing (1754). It is discussed in Allen Ramsay’s Dialogue on Taste (1755), extended in Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of an Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), echoed in Hogarth’s inscription to his 1758 engraving “The Bench,” thoroughly absorbed in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) which Hogarth illustrated, translated into Italian in 1761, worried in Lord Kames’s

87

Essay V

Elements of Criticism (1762), and finally openly attacked while silently plagia‑ rized in Diderot’s Salon de 1765 (1765). An account of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics in the anachronistic terms of a smoothly developing preparation for twentieth­‑century aesthetic theories that leaves such an extensive mid­‑century body of work unaddressed needs rethinking. What undermines this still influential account definitively, I believe, is the conjunction of this major neglect of the mid­‑century with the central ele‑ ments in Hogarth’s revolutionary 1753 treatise. Far from trying to articulate an understanding of beauty in terms of aesthetic attitude, Hogarth puts his emphasis unremittingly on nature and not on the subject. Following the lead of one of his sources, Haydock’s 1598 Oxford translation of Lomazzo’s trea‑ tise, Tracte containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carringe, & Buildinge, Hogarth is concerned with “searching out the nature of things,” as Lomazzo says, by proceeding to show what the fundamental principles of beauty are in nature itself (xx,1,7). Unlike the connoisseurs who stressed the “manners in which pictures are painted,” Hogarth saw his task as one of “perfecting the ideas they ought to have in their minds of the objects themselves in nature” (4, 6). This task was one of retraining “the painter’s eye” to receive these new impressions,” or in one of Hogarth’s key phrases, “to see objects truly” (4, 5). Such an eye comes to grasp eventually “the whole order of form” in nature (xvii) by making ap‑ propriate use of the six fundamental principles – fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity. These principles “cooperate in the produc‑ tion of beauty … when duly blended together»(12). Although Hogarth sometimes talks as if training the painterly eye might seem to consist in adopting a certain attitude towards natural objects, in fact Hogarth sees this training as based on his own interest not in mental states but in anatomy, psychology, and especially visual perception. Recalling in this context one of Hogarth’s celebrated examples helps us see just how far an aesthetic attitude account of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics strays from the very marked and yet qualified empirical character of Hogarth’s seminal work. Here is the example cited at some length for appreciation. “Consider a figure which represents the eye, at a common reading distance viewing a row of letters, but fix’d with most attention to the middle letter A. Now as we read, a ray may be supposed to be drawn from the center of the eye to that letter it looks at first, and to move successively with it from letter to letter, the whole length of the line: but if the eye stops at any particular letter, A, to observe it more than the rest, these other letters will grow more

88



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

and more imperfect to the sight, the farther they are situated on either side of A … figure: and when we endeavour to see all the letters in a line equally perfect at one view, as it were, this imaginary ray must course it to and fro with great celerity. Thus though the eye, strictly speaking, can only pay due attention to these letters in succession, yet the amazing ease and swiftness, with which it performs this task, enables us to see considerable spaces with sufficient satisfaction at one sudden view. Hence, we shall always suppose some such principal ray moving along with the eye, and tracing out the parts of every form, we mean to examine in the most perfect manner: and when we would follow with exactness the course anybody takes, that is in motion, this ray is always to be supposed to move with the body. In this manner of attending to forms, they will be found whether at rest, or in motion, to give movement to this imaginary ray; or, more properly speaking, to the eye itself, affecting it thereby more or less pleasingly, according to their different shapes and motions.”28

Note that this extended illustration is not without important ambiguities. In particular, just what kind of properties characterize certain forms is obscure. Yet Hogarth’s account here and elsewhere is clearly on nature and not on the subject. In short, as reflection on the details of this example suggests, both the revolutionary place of Hogarth’s work in the movement of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics as well as the unmistakable accent of his entire theory of beauty on the primacy of nature over the artist disallows the final satisfactoriness of one of the major readings of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics mainly in terms of aesthetic attitude theories. The second account of the movement of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics, this time in terms of theories of taste, is not uninstructive either. The chal‑ lenge to an aestheticattitude reading is especially well articulated, and the gen‑ eral structure of taste theories is nicely laid out. But I want to claim that this alternative reading is also flawed in very much the same two ways as its rival. For despite its attentions to Burke, historically this second account still makes no room for the key idea that the mid­‑century brings not just a devel‑ opment in aesthetics but a startling revolutionary break with the past. Moreover, the nature of that revolution cannot be grasped by attending just to Burke’s emphasis on the empirical. Rather, talk of the empirical must be nuanced with close attention to the shifting mid­‑century discussions of different senses of realism. Finally, however we read the much more complex history of the late century, the basic claim in the second account that the con‑ cept of taste replaces the concept of beauty in the course of the eighteenth­ ‑century is mistaken.

89

Essay V

When we return to the remarkable interactions between aesthetics and literature from say 1743 when Fielding and Hogarth published their closely related reflections on caricature to 1763 when Kant published his precritical Reflections (Beobachtungen), we are not able to justify the claim that the con‑ cept of taste replaces that of beauty. And when we look in detail at Hogarth’s 1753 own Analysis of Beauty we do not find there any positive analysis of taste. Taste, like disinterestedness, is repeatedly denigrated – “so vague is taste when it has no solid principles for its formulation” (7, 5). The major task rather is to investigate the physical causes of beauty and thereby replace the vague talk of taste and beauty as the infamous “unaccount‑ able something,” the “je ne sais quoi” to which earlier speculative theoreticians had referred, with a carefully observed discussion of certain properties natu‑ ral objects manifest. This discussion, carefully linked with a keen anatomical interest especially in visual perception especially as we read in the extended illustration Hogarth provides of the reading process, leads to a deeper under‑ standing of beauty and not of taste at all. Now beauty is seen as variety within uniformity. But Hutcheson’s for‑ mula is not just turned round. Hogarth insists on the key qualification of beauty as “a composed variety” within uniformity, a variety “with design” as he says (17). And the perception of this composed variety is seen to follow from the appropriate blending of the six fundamental principles in such a way that the first, fitness, remains preeminent as the functional adaptation of an object’s parts to the whole. These qualities, Hogarth insists, result in beauty and the pleasure beauty brings. This central emphasis in Hogarth on the relation between certain prop‑ erties of objects and certain ideas in the mind which lead to a richer, more nuanced understanding not of taste but of beauty can be noted in one further celebrated example from Hogarth’s treatise. Summarizing this example later on in the treatise he gives us its key: “consider the surfaces of objects as so many shells of lines closely connected together”(37). Here is his description: “… let every object under our consideration, be imagined to have its inward contents scoop’d out so nicely, as to have nothing of it left but a thin shell, exactly corresponding both in its inner and outer surface, to the shape of the object itself: and let us likewise suppose this thin shell to be made up of very fine threads, closely connected together, and equally perceptible, whether the eye is supposed to observe them from without, or within; and we shall find the ideas of the two surfaces of this shell will naturally coin‑ cide. The very word, shell, makes us seem to see both surfaces alike. The use of this conceit, as it may be call’d by some, will be seen to be very great, in

90



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

the process of this work: and the oftner we think of objects in this shelllike manner, we shall facilitate and strengthen our conception of any particular part of the surface of an object we are viewing, by acquiring thereby a more perfect knowledge of the whole, to which it belongs: because the imagina‑ tion will naturally enter into the vacant space within this shell, and there at once, as from a center, view the whole from within, and mark the opposite corresponding parts to strongly, as to retain the idea of the whole, and make us masters of the meaning of every view of the object, as we walk round it, and view it from without” (7–8).29

Once again, just as in the case of the first example, not everything in this illustration is self­‑evident. Just how we are to characterize those peculiar properties of objects that seem to appear to the imagination when objects are considered “in this shell­‑like manner” is not clear. But in general, as further reflection on this example brings out, we can no more accept Dickie’s alter‑ native account of the movement of eighteenth­‑century aesthetics merely in terms of the transformation of beauty into taste as we could Stolnitz’s rival view merely in terms of the development of precursors for aestheticattitude theories. In both cases, the revolutionary mid­‑century upheaval in eighteenth­ ‑century aesthetics in general as well as the carefully detailed concerns of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty call for a very different account altogether. In concluding I would like now to provide a sketch only of some reasons for characterizing Hogarth’s cardinal role in eighteenth­‑century aesthetics in terms of what we may call modernity’s realisms in the backgrounds to modern aesthetics.

Appearance, Reality, and Natural Continua Neither of the two distinguished readings of the movements of eighteenth­ ‑century aesthetics seems historically satisfactory or philosophically inter‑ esting enough. For both overlook the radical transformation of eighteenth­ ‑century reflections on beauty in the crucial mid­‑century work of Hogarth. And even when glancing briefly at Burke’s reflections as in part a sequel to Hogarth’s treatise, both fail to articulate the very striking character of Hog‑ arth’s aesthetics. What is particular to Hogarth’s contribution, I suggest, is the peculiar nature of his empiricism, of what we may call, with the help of several contem‑ porary glosses, his realism.30 Hogarth’s central place in eighteenth­‑century aesthetics, which neither of the two readings here seems to have grasped,

91

Essay V

derives from the unexpected realist and not just empiricist character of his aesthetics. As such, a finally unresolved tension between a formalism and an empiricism in Hogarth’s aesthetics constitutes the major eighteenth­‑century realist background of modern aesthetics. Recall briefly an overview of Hogarth’s complicated, often inconsistent, yet genuinely innovative views about nature, perception, and art. “… form can never be considered apart from movement. This idea led Ho‑ garth to reject all existing forms of art teaching and to construct his sys‑ tem of mnemonics, which enabled him always to see a part of a form in its connection with the living whole, and which led to his deep sense of organic form. Structure, organism, movement were felt to be all inseparable aspects of a single reality, which could further be grasped in terms of variety, intricacy, and simplification. The mnemonic system implied that the artist was in the midst of what he depicted, and thus a new concept of artistic activity was developed – activity and participation being inseparable. The search for form was a search into form, in which the relation of the active intellect and the object became a sort of ‘chace,’ and sensuous pleasure was an integral part of the act of grasping the form, defining, and enjoying it. In turn the quest for the inner structure, the wholeness, of a form was linked with the quest for inner meanings, for full human comprehension of all that was involved in a character, a sense, a group of persons. Here it was the use of emblems, of symbolic overtones and undertones, coming into play, with a highly complex working out.”31

We may sharpen these summary views I think by drawing on one of the most important strands in philosophical work outside aesthetics, the recent strug‑ gles to reformulate a more satisfactory sense of the slippery term “realism.” Beginning with a sketch of different interpretations of “realism” and showing how each construal relies on a dualistic view of reality with mind and its ideas and impressions (sense data) on one side and the primary qual‑ ities of the physical world on the other, Hilary Putnam argued that a central difficulty affects the notion of an intrinsic property, “a property something has ‘in itself ’ apart from any contribution made by language or the mind.” In its modern undifferentiated guise of “disposition,” the notion of intrinsic property leads to the denial of objective reality and a conflation of reality with thought. Putting things right requires avoiding both a reductive materialism which explains away the emergence of mind and an extreme relativism which cannot account for the external world. This understanding of the problems with intrinsic properties reflects a strong critical light back on Hogarth’s insistence on discussing the beauty

92



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

of the whole as most fundamentally arising out of fitness. For we need not take fitness as an intrinsic property. Fitness as the functional adaptation “of the parts to the design for which every individual thing is formed either by art or nature” is better construed as the basis of the other five principles Hogarth goes on to discuss, just as Soc‑ rates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Bk III, 8 and 10) insists in his discussion with the statuary Clito that “all things that men make use of seem good and beautiful for the same purpose, namely the proper use to which it is applied.” How then are we to parse Hogarth’s beauty as fitness when fitness is neither an intrinsic property nor a disposition? Recall some of the conceptual obscurity in Hogarth’s articulation of the two examples we considered earlier, the examples of the visual process in read‑ ing and the analysis of the inside as well as the outside of objects in the shell illustration. These examples show that Hogarth has a strong if somewhat un‑ certain grasp on the duality of certain properties like fitness as both objective and subjective. To think of these properties as intrinsic does violence to the examples. The ambiguous description of these properties is the basis of Hogarth’s insis‑ tence on interaction between what he takes as static and dynamic properties of objects and the exigencies for movement in the very structure of the eye. These properties in turn are the key to a new understanding of beauty in dy‑ namic interactional terms, in terms of dynamic natural continua. But how are we to construe such continua? Hogarth’s striking and novel suggestions in his treatise about natural continua are set in the context of a contrast between nature and art. When Hogarth opposes to the connoisseurs’s rule of copying or imitating great works of art his own pedagogical rule of copying nature, he is concerned to focus painterly representation on certain properties objects possess. But crucial properties such as fitness are not, we remember, to be ren‑ dered in all their variety “uncomposed,” and “without design.” Rather, they are to be interpreted; that is, variety is to be “composed.” Such composition for Hogarth comes to construing certain functional properties like fitness neither as intrinsic, nor as subjective or objective, but as natural continua understood in terms of dynamic interactions between socalled objective and subjective poles. When viewed from the perspective of a “pragmatic realism” like Put‑ nam’s, a world apparently without dichotomies, the world is neither an ap‑ pearance nor a reality. It exhibits neither a manifest nor a scientific image but includes both tables and chairs as well as quanta and gravitational fields.

93

Essay V

In short, we are forced to acknowledge that “many of our familiar descrip‑ tions reflect our interests and choices” (37). And yet we have no sufficient license for jettisoning the useful distinction between causes and background statements even when we must free such a distinction from any necessary tie to some fiction called nature in itself. Hogarth’s views remain important for many reasons. One of these rea‑ sons is not just that these views are essentially empirical. Rather Hogarth’s aesthetics is better described as a realist aesthetics in at least the pragmatic sense that the natural world which is to be the sole concern of the painterly eye is to be seen truly as neither a world of appearance nor as one of reality but as a natural continuum interacting as both reality and appearance with the dynamic structures, interests, and choices of the painterly eye itself.

Modernity’s Realist Backgrounds and Aesthetics The protracted scholarly dispute with which we began about modern aesthetic theory and its eighteenth­‑century conceptual and historical roots can be con‑ strued in a number of ways to reflect a number of interests. But at least one general point seems relatively non­‑controversial. In some strong sense how we understand philosophy and the arts today is largely tributary to the flour‑ ishing of aesthetic theory in the various thinkers of the eighteenth century, and how we construe those eighteenth­‑century theories is very closely tied to our modern philosophical concerns today. We read the eighteenth century from the perspective of our modern in‑ terests; conversely, many of these very interests exhibit the various concerns of the eighteenth­‑century thinkers. Thus, to take one example only, the gen‑ eral problem of how to characterize the peculiar judgments we find in the do‑ mains of the arts – “this X is beautiful” – remains caught even today between the tensions of various interpretations of the subjective and the objective. Philosophical consensus is still lacking on whether such judgments refer pre‑ eminently to objective properties of the artifact in question or to subjective impressions of its perceivers. But this problem first moved to the center of critical reflection on the arts in the eighteenth century when the classical doctrine of beauty gave way to a subtle and largely unnoticed kind of empirical realism. This happened largely owing to the impact of the empiricist philosophies of Bacon, Hobbes, and especially Locke in the preceeding generations. But it also came about from Hogarth’s struggles with the connoisseurs, his alliances with Fielding,

94



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

Garrick, and Sterne, and his strongly experimental reflections especially in his Analysis of Beauty, his sketchbooks, and his studies. Given such contexts the central concern here has been to show that more than one plausible reading of the seminal theorists of the arts in the eigh‑ teenth century is needed. Further, the plurality of such readings has central important consequences for how we are to continue to think critically about philosophy and the arts today. In particular, just how we construe the philosophy of art, how we identify its characteristic problems, how we differentiate the central problems of the philosophy of art from the peripheral ones, what we are ready to count as sat‑ isfactory formulations and elucidations of such problems, and just where such pursuits connect with our nonphilosophical questions and concerns whether scientific, ethical, political, or religious – each of these radically important matters may be seen freshly when we draw the philosophical consequences of such a plurality in our readings. The approach has been to pursue the backgrounds of one central dispute in the larger contexts of philosophical readings of eighteenth­‑century aesthet‑ ics. Thus there is no need to assume and selfimposed task of trying to adju‑ dicate finally between Stolnitz and Dickie on the respective historical roles and structures of taste theories and aesthetic attitude theories. Instead, I have tried to counter the shared features of such readings, the many similarities on which both parties have continually commented, with the features of a very different reading. A very different reading I believe arises out of Hogarth’s realist aesthet‑ ics. This reading needs to be associated with the relatively unknown yet ex‑ tremely instructive attempt in the mid­‑nineteenth century of Bernard Bolza‑ no to construct, in his critical interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, an aesthetics that arguably exhibits both the characteristic preoccupation with argumentative rigor one appreciates in many analytic accounts and the charac‑ teristic concern with relatively intractable and therefore often ignored themes such as “subjectivity” and “historicity” which one often finds in many herme‑ neutic accounts.

95

Essay V

Envoi: Realisms After Modernity Bolzano’s critique of Kant is the major development after Hogarth of a realist tradition in the reading of the difficult relations between philosophy and the arts, a reading which runs through interpretations of “realism” through Dil‑ they, Brentano, Meinong, Twardowski, Husserl, and Ingarden. This material is of course very diverse, and it includes many different kinds of “realism”. I do not want to claim that such diversity is to be unified in any one way. Rather, in importantly different roles I think each of these thinkers belongs in a tradition that is properly characterized as neither ana‑ lytic nor hermeneutic. For each is in similar ways a beneficiary of Bolzano’s critique of Kant that avoids both the progressive, analytic reading of Kantian aesthetics as the culmination of eighteenth­‑century thinking and the regres‑ sive, hermeneutic reading of Kantian aesthetics from a later Hegelian per‑ spective as a strongly cognitivist program that must be overcome. But that is another story perhaps for another occasion when Hogarth can again conduct us on a different but just as varied “wanton chace.”

96



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

Endnotes 1

This text is a revised version of a paper first presented an invited lecture presented at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow and published in Russian in S. Shestakov, Hogarth (Moscow, 1989. I am grateful to S. Shestakov, K. Loukitchova, T. F. Very‑ snikova and to anonymous referees of the Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism for their constructive critical comments. For the extraordinary English eighteenth­ ‑century work in aesthetics see P. McCormick, Modernity, Aesthetics, and The Bounds of Art (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990).

2

E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. P. Guyer, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 25–26; emphases omit‑ ted).

3

J. Burke, “A Classical Account of Hogarth’s Theory of Art,” Journal of the War‑ burg qnf Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), 151. See especially P. Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics , 3 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2014).

4

See the 1973 facsimile reprint (New York, Garland). Cf. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. J. Burke (Oxford, 1955), p. xlvii. Bibliographical details can be found in S. Read, “Some Observations on W. Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty: A Bibliographi‑ cal Study,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 5 (1941–42), 360–73. For bibliographical information on other eighteenth­‑century work in England see J.W. Draper, Eigh‑ teenth Century English Aesthetics (Heidelberg, 1931). A basic work on Hogarth is R. Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1971). For some historical background see D. Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (London, 1974).

5

J. Lindsay, Hogarth: His Art and His World (New York, 1979), Preface. For im‑ portant background in the arts see M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Nov‑ el, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987); D. Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New Haven, 1986); M. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1980); and R. Paulson’s book, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetics Practice in English, 1700– 1820 (Baltimore, 1990).

6

See especially P. Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics , 3 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 2014).

7

The hermeneutic picture in, for example, H.G. Gadamer, Wahrheit and Methode (Heidelberg, 1960), is also distorted but in a very different way than what we may call the analytic picture.

97

Essay V

8

A much more extended discussion can be found in P. McCormick, Modernity and the Bounds of Art: Eighteenth­‑Century Origins and the Realist Backgrounds of Aes‑ thetics (Ithaca, 1990).

9

G. Dickie, “Stolnitz’s Attitude: Taste and Perception,” JAAC, 43 (1984), 195–203 (cited hereafter as “Dickie 1984”), and J. Stolnitz, “’The Aesthetic Attitude’ in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics,” JAAC, 43 (1984), 205–208 (cited hereafter as “Stol‑ nitz 1984”).

10

Boston, 1960, pp. 34–35.

11

Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), 185–86 and 189.

12

JAAC (1961), reprinted in G. Dickie and R.J. Sclafani, eds., Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (New York, 1977). I cite the pagination in this reprint, p. 607. This an‑ thology includes in its excellent bibliographies references to other nonhistorical articles of both Stolnitz and Dickie. A second edition of the anthology, very sub‑ tantially revised, appeared in 1989.

13

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1961), 98–99. Contrast Stolnitz’s view of Hutches‑ on with, for example,that of J. Moore in “The Two Systems of F. Hutcheson,” in M.A. Stewart, ed. Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Ox‑ ford, 1990), pp. 37–61.

14

Philosophy, 338 (1963), 47–48.

15

Indianapolis, 1971 (cited hereafter as “Dickie 1971”). For some of the underlying earlier work see Dickie, “All Aesthetic Attitude Theories Fail: The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,”American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), 56–66 which dis‑ cusses other systematic papers of Stolnitz.

16

Dickie 1984, p. 195.

17

Dickie 1971, p. 31.

18

Dickie 1971, p. 32.

19

Ithaca, 1974 (cited hereafter as “Dickie 1974”). This book includes Dickie’s article, “Taste and Attitude: The Origin of the Aesthetic., Theoria, 39 (1973). Dickie pres‑ ents a somewhat different historical picture in Evaluating Art (Philadelphia, 1989). He is now preparing a more comprehensive view in a new manuscript on the key eighteenth­‑century figures which focusses strongly on the associationists (private communication).

20

Dickie 1974, pp. 55ff.

98



Visual Forms in Hogarth’s Aesthetics

21

Dickie 1984, p. 195. Note that in his 1989 book Dickie now speaks of a four­‑part structure to the theory of taste (pp. 20–21).

22

JAAC, 36 (1978), 409–422 (cited hereafter as “Stolnitz 1978”).

23

Stolnitz 1978, p. 412.

24

Stolnitz 1978, p. 409.

25

Each of the two principals here has had his supporters. For Stolnitz see S. K. Saxe‑ na, “The Aesthetic Attitude,” Philosophy East and West, (hereafter, cited as PEW ) 28 (1978), 81–90; the criticisms of this article in E. Coleman, “On Saxena’s Defense of the Aesthetic Attitude,” PEW, 29 (1979), 95–97; and M. H. Snoeyenbos, “Sax‑ ena on the Aesthetic Attitude,” PEW, 29 (1979), 99–101, together with Saxena’s, “Reply to My Critics,” PEW, 29 (1979), 215–220. See also J. Margolis, “Review of Dickie’s Art and the Aesthetic,” JAAC, 33 (1975), 341–45, together with Dickie’s “A Reply to Professor Margolis,” JAAC, (1975), 229–231. Dickie’s views are sup‑ ported in P. Kivy, “Recent Scholarship and the British Tradition: A Logic of Taste – The First Fifty Years,” in Dickie and Sclafani 1977, pp. 6216–642, and J. Fisher, “Review of Woltersterff ’s Art in Action,” JAAC, 39 (1980), 209–10. Finally, several other pieces need to be noted for the record without trying to document every‑ thing. See R. Arnheim’s “Reconsiderations 2: Review of Langfeld’s The Aesthetic Attitude,” JAAC 39 (1980), 201–203, and Dickie’s “Reconsiderations 6: Review of Prall’s Aesthetic Judgment,” JAAC, 42 (1983), 83–85, as well as his book, The Art Circle (New York, 1984).

26

The term “realist” of course is deliberated vague since I do not want to distinguish sharply here between metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and other versions of “realism,” although I do elsewhere.

27

J. Lindsay, Hogarth: His Art and His World (New York, 1979), Preface.

28

The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, III., 1987), p. 8. Early discussions can be found, for example, in his chapters on nominalism and realism in The Philosophy of Logic (New York, 1971), pp. 9–33.

29

Ibid., pp. 7–8.

30

Quoted in J. Burke, “A Classical Aspect of Hogarth’s Theory of Art,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), 151.

31

On talk of fictions here see P. McCormick, Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics (Ithaca, 1988), especially Chapter Nine, “Fictional Worlds.”

99

100

Essay VI: Bolzano’s Dark Realism1 “We call an object beautiful if its mere consideration provides us with pleasure, a consideration which we carry out with such a facility that not even in a single case do we need to become conscious of its accompa‑ nying thoughts.” Bernard Bolzano2 “the beautiful object is one whose purposefulness is of such a nature that it can be recognised even confusedly. This purposefulness is objective. . . [but] purposeful‑ ness must not be too deeply hidden, because otherwise it would only be recognisable through a strenuous re‑ flection which would result in clear judgments. Bernard Bolzano3

Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) is most widely known for his outstanding work in mathematics, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of logic.4 In this essay however I want to look sympathetically yet critically at the major fea‑ ture of his most important reflections on aesthetics, his theory of beauty. In order to situate these reflections in the development of modern aes‑ thetics and to make their expression more understandable, I propose in the first section of the paper to review briefly several of the central difficulties in Kant’s aesthetic. In section two I will then make use of Bolzano’s criticisms of Kant as an initial means of presenting Bolzano’s own philosophical concerns, before sketching further those themes which are peculiar to Bolzano’s work alone. Finally, I will suggest critical questions about Bolzano’s theory which call for further attention on the part of his interpreters and also on the part of those interested in a certain strain of post­‑Kantian aesthetics. Although my purposes here remain largely critical ones, I have tried to call attention to textual, historical and interpretative points in some of the ac‑ companying notes. My larger purpose is to suggest in a general way only that

101

Essay VI

Bolzano’s aesthetics, specifically his investigations into the concept of the beautiful, representmore than just an important and almost completely over‑ looked criticism of Kant’s well­‑known views; these investigations provide the basic linkbetween Kantian aesthetics and the work of the later Brentano, Mei‑ nong, Husserl, and Ingarden. In short,Bolzano’s aesthetics include the initial elements of what might be called the realist tradition in modern aesthetics.

Kant and the Subjectivisation of Aesthetics In this section I want to recall in a general way several of the central diffi‑ culties which arise out of Kant’s analytic of the beautiful in his Critique of Judgment.5 These difficulties will help us establish the philosophical context in which Bolzano’s reflections on aesthetics are situated. There are a number of controversial elements in Kant’s analysis of the nature of aesthetic judgment.6 One problem is the ambiguity in Kant’s account of judgment as present‑ ed in the Third Critique and elsewhere (most notably perhaps in the distinc‑ tion in the First Critique between analytic and synthetic) between the act of judging, the contents of that act, and a spatio­‑temporal correlate for these contents.7 Although Kant takes great pains in his account of aesthetic judgment to draw on the analysisof mental acts which he develops in his previous two critiques, nowhere does he remove the ambiguities which continually play around his use of the word ‘judgment’. This is unfortunate. For unless we can determine, in each of the four moments of his analysis of those judgments which deal with the beautiful, just which of these different senses are preem‑ inent, we continually run the risk of either, at one extreme, reading Kant’s account as hopelessly psychologistic, or, at the other, of taking Kant’s account as nothing more than a prelude to some more adequate linguistic treatment of the same matters. Are we, in other words, to construe aesthetic judgments as empirical events in individual minds, or are we to understand them as a species of mental sentence? In the first case any ‘claims about universality and necessity would be definitively excluded, while in the second, whatever necessity which might at least be claimed, could be argued away by those unsympathetic to it as an‑ alytic only.8 When we then reread the Third Critique with this question in mind, I think we must conclude that neither of these interpretations does justice to Kant’s aims here. His analysis of aesthetic judgment, that is, must be taken

102



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

neither as merely psychologistic nor as merely linguistic. But exactly how we are to mediate between these extremes while giving Kant’s own expressions their proper due is not at first glance obvious. For a second, and related difficulty pervades Kant’s account. Kant, as we may have noticed, is not uninterested in developing arguments against op‑ posed interpretations of the nature of aesthetic judgments. It is striking that so many of these arguments turn on Kant’s insistence that aesthetic judg‑ ments are indeterminate. In other words, as reflective judgments aesthetic judgments do not function with the help of antecedent concepts.9 This doctrine is central to Kant’s treatment of the basically disinterested character of aesthetic judgments. The difficulty here of course is in trying to account both for the lack of any determinate control exercised over aesthetic judgments by clear and perspicuous concepts and at the same time for the nonetheless somewhat specific nature of aesthetic judgment. Here once again Kant’s way of making his point can be importantly con‑ fusing. Thus he speaks as if there were no conceptual control at all in aesthetic judgment, while still recognising in the practice of art the role of what Plato construed as exemplary causes. Kant provides us with no graduated range of conceptual possibilities to draw on here as an effective means for dealing with his puzzling talk.We are not sure at places if Kant wants us to think of pre­‑conceptual rather than non­ ‑conceptual modes of thinking. And more specifically in the case of conceptu‑ al thought itself, Kant allows us here no distinction between concepts that are confused rather than clear, complete rather than incomplete, justified rather than non­‑justified, and so on. In short, we are left just as in the case of his talk about judgments with no more than our own rough approximations to Kant’s intentions as a way of arguing our felt conviction that Kant wants to retain at least some pre­ ‑conceptual control over the contents of aesthetic judgments. Some concep‑ tual control is thus necessary for the well­‑foundedness of aesthetic judgments. But just what kind of control remains inexplicit. A third difficulty in Kant’s account is the link between the feelings of pleasure and displeasure and the nature of aesthetic judgment. For Kant the link is essential. And of course in holding that there is some sort of relation between pleasure and aesthetic judgment Kant is doing no more than follow‑ ing a remarkably consistent pattern in the history of aesthetics. For not only do Plato and Aristotle both insist on this connection, al‑ though each is careful to draw different conclusions from such a conjunction, Augustine and Aquinas, too, award a central place to pleasure in their respec‑

103

Essay VI



tive aesthetic theories. The problem is, rather, that unlike his classical and medieval predecessors in this matter, and most curiously unlike his habitual practice with almost all of his other cardinal concepts in the Third Critique, Kant takes virtually no interest whatsoever in explaining to his readers just what he understands by his very varied uses of the word ‘pleasure’. This practice once again is seriously disconcerting. For one of the cor‑ nerstones of Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic judgment is the idea of disinterested pleasure.10 And it is from the well­‑foundedness of this idea that Kant wants to derive, in a loose sense of this logical term, his further characterisation of aesthetic judgments as judgments having universal import. To make this point Kant even varies the usual order of the four moments as he expounds them in the First Critique, electing in the Third Critique to begin with the moment of quality rather than with that of quantity. If, we are unclear then as to the sense underlying Kant’s use of the term ‘pleasure’, we must remain equally if not more unclear about the sense of his term ‘disinterested pleasure’. And if confusion remains on this point, then how are we to comprehend the connections which Kant repeatedly insists on between disinterested pleasure and universalisability? It is critically important to note that such reflections are not simply quib‑ bles about a certain inevitable degree of obscurity which is characteristically involved in attempts to define central philosophical terms. Kant’s various uses of the word ‘pleasure’ here – some commentators such as Coleman have de‑ scribed at least seven distinct senses of the term11 – leave us in a quite pecu‑ liarly difficult situation if we are to assess the validity of his arguments for the necessity of the connection between pleasure and aesthetic judgments. This defect in Kant’s analysis is all the more consequential to the degree that, without such clarification for his defence, even sympathetic critics are left with too few resources for resisting the conclusion that Kant’s insistence on a necessary connection is quite simply misplaced. Thus, many would hold that we can properly speak of aesthetic judgments not only in those cases where feelings of pleasure or displeasure accompany such judgments, but just as well in those other cases where the putatively beautiful object leaves us ei‑ ther indifferent or with no feelings of pleasure or displeasure at all. Consider the indifference and sometimes complete and utter lack of feel‑ ing that often assails even the careful critic who spends too long of an after‑ noon in a particularly outstanding museum. This important point is well put in Coleman’s comment on this topic: Like many other objects in the world, a work of art can hold the attention without likes or dislikes being summoned to the scene … aesthetic judg‑

104



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

ment is broader than feeling pleasure or displeasure, judgments of aesthetic mediocrity or indifference are no less aesthetic judgments for being con‑ cerned with what is neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable. Moreover, aes‑ thetic judgment is often engaged in discernment or detection just as much as in enjoyment and delectation. If one is interested in something – even disinterested in Kant’s sense – it does not necessarily follow that we must be interested hedonically.12

How are we to deal with appraisals such as these when Kant himself foregoes defining more carefully one of his most central terms? A fourth difficulty which is raised by Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic judg‑ ment has to do with the provocative account he provides of the free play of imagination and understanding.13 Kant holds that it is precisely the harmony of this play of our intellectual faculties which generates the feelings of plea‑ sure which are said to be the necessary concomitants of aesthetic judgments. We need not here of course insist on the easily remedied confusion which Kant’s habitual talk of faculties involves. Like his predecessors and his con‑ temporaries Kant continued to speak of the mind in terms of separate facul‑ ties regardless of several apparent consequences of his epistemology as to the existence or non­‑existence of such entities. Moreover, in the case of aesthetic judgments, Kant never tired of for‑ mulating his views in terms of the faculty of taste,14 instead of addressing the nature of aesthetic judgment without appeal to any such intermediary. We need not follow Kant in these practices however; when Kant speaks of the faculties of understanding, imagination and taste, we need only talk of understanding, imagining, or judging something to be beautiful. But a difficulty does arise just as soon as we try to pin down exactly what it is that Kant means by the ‘free play’ of understanding and imagining. And part of this difficulty is related to the earlier problem as to whether or not all aesthetic judgments unify their contents in terms of concepts, and if so in terms of just what kinds of concepts. For the ‘freedom’ Kant has in mind here, at leastin the case of imaginings, has to do basically with a freedom from at least some kinds of clear conceptual constraints. But this is not all of the difficulty. For what needs still further sorting out is Kant’s perspective here. When he speaks of ‘free play’ and ‘harmony’, does he have in mind the aesthetic judgments of artists in the throes of creation or audiences in the tangles of artistic appreciation? The difference here is important. For it poses little problem for Kant’s account if we focus our attention on the role that exemplarity plays in artistic conception. In fact, this case seems to be the central one for Kant. But when

105

Essay VI

we turn to the vagaries which accompany the making of aesthetic judgments on the part of an individual patron or an audience as a whole, then there seems to be little if any role for exemplary causes at all. And if we set such entities aside, then, just which features of the audience’s experience are relevant to Kant’s ‘free play of understanding and imagination’? Kant assumes, I think, the relevance of his analysis to the case of the art‑ ist. But in leaving on the margins of his account the appeal to the free play of imagination and understanding in the aesthetic judgments of an audience, he invites criticism of the universality which he claims for this feature. In short, more than just artists make aesthetic judgments. And in the case of nonartists Kant leaves obscure whether there too we can speak of a har‑ mony of the faculties generating feelings of pleasure or displeasure in those making aesthetic judgments. A fifth and perhaps the most important difficulty with Kant’s account has to do with his analysis of form.15 Kant16 wants to distinguish between temporal forms which he calls ‘play’ and non­‑temporal (mostly spatial) forms which he calls ‘figure’. Unlike the immediately perceived features of non­‑temporal form, the features of tempo‑ ral form require the work of the imagination to produce some kind of synthe‑ sis for the operation of judgment. Kant takes pains to insist that the aesthetic use of the word ‘form’ is not meant to include ‘shape’ as such, or even a particular ‘fixed form’ such as that which is a necessary feature in certain genres of, say, the literary arts such as the sonnet. Rather, although each of these may be associated with aesthetic forms, what is peculiarly distinctive of aesthetic form is its connection with the individuality of the object which as judged as beautiful. For this reason of course Kant holds that aesthetic judgments are singular even though they are universalisable. A further point which needs notice is that Kant does not construe this individual form with the help of abstraction from the material contents of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgments have content and some of this con‑ tent includes what Kant wants to call aesthetic form. This aesthetic form, as Coleman has noted, ‘arises out of the interplay’ of the different ways in which the contents of the aesthetic judgment are organised, of the varieties, we might say, with which certain aesthetic constraints within a given medium are interrelated. Kant goes on to distinguish between pure form as opposed to mere form. Mere form is linked with Kant’s idea of dependent beauty. That is, like depen‑ dent beauty, mere form relies upon a concept of what the beautiful thing must

106



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

be in its perfected state. Pure form on the other hand is linked with Kant’s idea of free beauty. Like free beauty, pure form does not involve this depen‑ dence on a concept. Again this talk of concepts is disconcerting because Kant does not make the notion any more specific. The basic problem however is making sense of what Kant means here by pure form or aesthetic form properly speaking. Some have suggested that aesthetic form “. . . is either what the artist imparts by the workings of his own subjec‑ tive schematism, or what the perceiver, in aesthetic judgment, recognizes as what would be an expression of his own subjective schematism.”17 But this interpretation is complicated by the additional problem of sorting out Kant’s earlier and difficult doctrine of the schematism.

The basic idea of a schema is the capacity to articulate in a temporal mode cat‑ egories and concepts, a capacity to articulate models which include categories and concepts. ‘Although the schemata of sensibility,’ Kant writes in the First Critique first realize the categories, they at the same time restrict them, that is, limit them to conditions which lie outside the understanding, and are due to sen‑ sibility. The schema is, properly, only the phenomenon, or sensible concept of an object in agreement with the categories.18

In the “Analytic of theSublime” in the Third Critique Kant applies this doc‑ trine to the imagination. He or she holds there that the imagination involves a kind of spontaneity which is associated with our feelings of pleasure and displeasure.19 This spontaneity appears to impose an individual form on the central contents of the aesthetic judgment. The idea then seems to be this: the artist in making aesthetic judgments does so in the light of his own previous experience of styles, conventions, tra‑ ditions, and what not – in short, in terms of a schema. It is this standard which the artist continually calls on individually when he comes to make particular judgments about beautiful things. The schema is thus a general, partially indeterminate framework or open set of regularities which functions as a principle in accordance with which aes‑ thetic judgments are made. Such an influence on the contents of the aesthetic judgment might then be construed as an imposition of form. The form imposed on the contents however is not at all the classical cor‑ relate of matter in the Aristotelian and later scholastic metaphysics. Rather,

107

Essay VI

it is a subjective schematism to which contents of individual aesthetic judg‑ ments are spontaneously referred through “free play of the imagination.” A similar schematism may be taken as operative in aesthetic judgments made by audiences. Such schematism Kant holds to be produced by the pure categories when they are subsumed under space and time.20 When we reflect again on at least these five kinds of difficulty which threaten the final satisfactoriness of Kant’s aesthetics in the Critique of Judg‑ ment, on the difficulties, that is, with such major themes as judgment, con‑ cept, pleasure, harmony, and form, then I think it not unfair to talk of a ‘sub‑ jectivisation of aesthetics’. The subjectivisation of aesthetics in Kant’s work is nothing more nor less than the preeminence of the form and contents of aesthetic judgments over their spatio­‑temporal correlates. The central theme of early modern aesthetics is not the transformation of the theory of beauty into the theory of the aesthetic. Nor, either, is it the grad‑ ual eclipse of the cognitivity of the art­‑work. The subjectivisation of aesthetics calls out for a systematic inquiry into those essential ambiguities which Kant leaves finally untouched in his account of the nature of aesthetic judgments. I want to suggest in this paper that Bolzano’s analysis of the concept of the beautiful, whatever difficulties it may have of its own, is one essential step in carrying through such an inquiry.

Bolzano and the Theory of the Beautiful With these five difficulties in Kant’s discussion of the beautiful in the Critique of Judgment in reasonably clear view, I want now to turn to Bolzano’s aesthet‑ ics.21 My initial purpose here will be to situate Bolzano’s own discussion of the beautiful in terms of his account of Kant.22 Having made this transition, I want then to enlarge upon what he shows us of his own views in his discus‑ sion of Kant by paying closer attention to what he himself has to say about each individual theme. Bolzano’s most important work on aesthetics is his Über den Begriff des Schönen: Eine philosophische Abhandlung which first appeared in Prague in 1843 as a separate publication. It was then reprinted in the Transactions of the Royal Bohemian Academy of Sciences in 1845, three years before his death at the age of 67.23 This essay of little more than a hundred pages made up of 57 sections of unequal length can conveniently be divided into roughly six parts: an intro‑ duction (section 1), an initial characterisation of the beautiful (sections 2–13), a formulation of the concept of the beautiful (sections 14–15), consequences

108



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

and corollaries of this formulation (sections 16–18), objections (sections 19– 25), and finally a long historical discussion (sections 26–57) which accounts for more than half of the essay’s length. Bolzano’s discussion of Kant occurs, as might be expected, at the centre of this lengthy historical survey. It consists almost exclusively of an exposi‑ tion of Kant’s treatment of the four ‘moments’ of quality, quantity, relation and modality. Bolzano begins his discussion on a critical note. For he observes that Kant, far from providing us with a single definition of the beautiful as Bolzano himself does in section 14, has left us with four definitions. Moreover, each of these is supposed to represent the beautiful in terms of the respective four cat‑ egories in which any object whatsoever, whether beautiful or otherwise, can be exhaustively described. Bolzano is ironic here(„Aus Liebe zu seinen Kate‑ gorien . . . beschenkte uns Kant . . „‘) about the doctrine of the categories.24 But he is also plainly dissatisfied with several of the proposed definitions for three substantive reasons. The last three definitions seem, like the first, to describe a quality of the beautiful, and hence are not clearly separate definitions at all. The second definition deals with universality rather than, as Kant claims, with ‘quantity’. And the third definition Bolzano reads as relevant to the ‘relation’ in only the narrowest of senses. Difficulties of this sort lead Bolzano to examine each of the four definitions more closely. The first definition Bolzano paraphrases from Kant’s Third Critique as “the beautiful is what pleases disinterestedly,”25 and reminds us that what Kant means by “interest” here is the feeling we associate with the representation of the existence of an object. In the case of something beautiful the feeling we have is bound up with the representation of the object only and not with the representation of its existence. Bolzano however finds this account unacceptable. He points out that Kant’s use of the term “interest” does not correspond to any of our everyday uses of the term – which Bolzano goes on to describe: When we find something interesting we usually mean (1) that the thing merits our attention, or (2) that we can expect for ourselves some advantage from this thing. But in neither sense must we say that when we find some‑ thing ‘interesting’ we must find in ourselves some kind of feelingrelated to the existence of the object. Specifically, Bolzano wants to say when what is at issue is a beautiful ob‑ ject, it is surely false to claim that we have no interest in the beautiful when “interest”is understood in either of its two usual senses.

109

Essay VI

In short, Kant’s first definition would seem to be persuasive only if we are willing to follow him in adopting his peculiar and unusual sense of this term. But not only does Kant give us no reasons to make this adoption, his unargued construal of this term seems indeed in some of the centrally inter‑ esting cases to result in a false account.26 The second definition Bolzano paraphrases as “the beautiful is what without concepts pleases generally,” which is supposed to be a consequence of the first definition.27 Bolzano carefully cites a number of other texts in or‑ der to follow, if he can, the precise relation which Kant sees between the two definitions.28 But he does not succeed. What pleases generally is what pleases everyone, Kant says. Bolzano tries to clarify the sense of this “jedermann” and concludes that not only God but many other persons must be excluded from it. For Kant has in mind here ev‑ ery person of a certain level of cultivation. Kant’s definition thus is too broadly construed and hence, Bolzano con‑ cludes, the purported general proof of this definition must break down be‑ cause it would have to prove too much. A more, interesting objection is Bolzano’s distinction between concepts which are required for the effecting of certain judgments and concepts of which we are conscious when effecting such judgments. Bolzano uses this distinction to challenge the first reason Kant adduces for his claim that judgments of taste are judgments without concepts, and cites against him both his own repeated remarks about the imagination and the understanding in B 28 as well as his example in B 49. The second justification which Kant provides for his claim, that there is no transition from concepts to feelings of desire or lack of desire (B18), Bolz‑ ano also finds inadequate. For he cites as a counterexample the feelings which arise in someone who becomes acquainted with a particular kind of object solely by means of theoretical concepts. Thus, since neither justification withstands criticism, Bolzano concludes that the second definition must also be set aside. The third definition is paraphrased as “the beautiful is what seems to us purposeful without our having nevertheless a representation of its purpose.”29 Kant holds that something beautiful which is the object of a judgment of taste cannot have either a subjective or an objective purpose and yet may and must have a form of purposefulness. Bolzano rejects this doctrine because he claims that it depends, in the end, on two previous contentions which he has already rejected, namely that the feeling of beauty has to be connected with

110



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

the representation and not the existence of an object and that there can be no transition from any kind of a concept to a feeling for something beautiful. Again however there is a more interesting objection. Bolzano holds that Kant’s doctrine of a “form of purposefulness without purpose” involves sub‑ stantive and not just verbal contradictions. Precisely in the many circumlocu‑ tions Kant employs to convey this doctrine, the question arises as to just how, if there is no purpose, the form of purposefulness is to be recognised. For Bolzano ‘the perception of purposefulness… always presupposes perception of a definite purpose.’30 Hence for Bolzano if there is no purpose there can be no form of purposefulness. What we find in beautiful things, Bolzano holds, is not purpose at all, but rules and concepts. When we consider a rose as something beautiful, we find a series of regularities which leads to our taking a kind of pleasure in the rose which we then go on to judge as something beautiful. The final definition Bolzano paraphrases as “the beautiful is what with‑ out concepts is recognised nonetheless as an object of a necessary feeling of well­‑being.”31 Bolzano concurs with Kant’s view that the necessity at issue here is not an objective necessity so long as the judgments of taste under dis‑ cussion have empirical objects (like, for example, this rose). But in those cases where the objects at issue are pure concepts (such as, for example, virtue), then Bolzano thinks that we cannot get away from objective necessity. Moreover, although Bolzano is willing to follow Kant in speaking of a distinction among , objective, theoretical and practical necessity,32 he finds Kant’s talk of ‘exemplary necessity’ almost incomprehensible as also his talk of certain kinds of universality.33 Most interesting perhaps is Bolzano’s criticism here that Kant’s peculiar use of the word “feeling” indicates clearly that he is not talking about feeling at all but about a kind of knowing.34

Elucidating Bolzano’s Views Now this, or something much like it, is the substance of Bolzano’s critique of Kant. It provides several indications of the approach which he himself would follow. But just what, then, is the gist of Bolzano’s own view? Bolzano’s aim in his short treatise on the beautiful is to provide a clari‑ fication, or a definition in the broad sense of the term, for the concept of the beautiful. His main concern is to determine whether what we usually call the beautiful refers to something simple or to something complex. If the latter,

111

Essay VI

then an additional task is that of determining which of several conceivable referents is the most appropriate one. In order to help his readers understand just what is to count as a clarifi‑ cation Bolzano sets out four preparatory points. He begins by recalling that philosophers often change their minds about what they mean by certain key words and phrases. What Bolzano himself is aiming at here however, “objective propositions and truths” and “objective concepts and representations,”35 do not allow of any subjective changes in their meanings at all. This contrast between objective and subjective is worked out in great detail in the first two volumes of Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre to which he alludes here.36 But the point of the distinction may be seen more succinctly in his example in the present text of a contrast between objective concept (Be‑ griff an sich) and concept or idea (Begriffender Vorstellung). For example, the word ‘God’ in philosophy, Bolzano claims, signifies a single objective concept only, even though there may well be an indefinite number of individual con‑ cepts and ideas or presentations of God. In the case of the beautiful then Bolzano’s clarification consisted in the attempt to formulate the objective concept of the beautiful, the unchangeable sense, Bolzano adds (in a reference to the practice of his own times, which still retained the schoolbook tradition of Leibniz, Baumgarten, Wolff and Kant), which is and should be found in university manuals in aesthetics. A second feature of what Bolzano calls a clarification is the rule that each objective concept is to be provided with one definition or clarification only. Not only, then, are the same words to be used in the same senses, but above all the same objective concepts are not to be defined in more than one way. What Bolzano wants to reject are examples such as J. H. Fichte’s definition of the absolute, while he wishes to retain examples like the mathematician’s definition of a square.37 A third point about clarification is the need for a certain kind of simplic‑ ity. Bolzano concedes that some objective concepts may indeed be complex. He insists however that each complex be clarified in such a way that it can be seen just how the complex is built up from the connection of simple compo‑ nents. This procedure Bolzano thinks not only contributes to clarity but in important respects reflects both some of the ways we actually use objective concepts and some of the ways this usage has been learned. Yet Bolzano is cautious here also, for he does not want to commit himself to the false view that any component which can be found in objects of a con‑ cept would have to be an actual component of the concept.38 If the beautiful

112



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

is an instance of a complex concept, then a clarification of the beautiful must include all of the components of this complex but not all of the properties which its objects have. Finally, Bolzano raises the question of just how a putative clarification is to be justified and thereby made persuasive both for oneself and for others. If the clarification is of a simple objective concept, then the only final jus‑ tification consists in showing the inadequacies of alternative suggestions. If however a complex objective concept is at issue, then both the component parts and their relations must be specified and the concept must be shown to be neither too narrow nor too broad. This second case Bolzano underlines as much more difficult than the first.For finally the justification of a putative clarification here is to be found through repeated acts of introspection only. Bolzano does not speak explic‑ itly of intuition. But he insists on the need for repeated attempts to direct our attention to those mental acts which both consist of and accompany our thinking of the beautiful. When Bolzano proposes, then, to formulate a clarificatory definition of the beautiful, he aims at providing one and not several articulations of an ob‑ jective concept which, if complex, must include all and only those compo‑ nents and relations which are proper to it alone. Once these four preliminary points have been made, Bolzano begins his analysis of the beautiful by making several exclusions. The beautiful, he holds, is not to be confounded with either the good or the pleasant, or the charming.So far as the good is concerned, although many good things can rightly be called beautiful, not all beautiful things are properly to be called good; they often are called good simply on the basis of custom. As regards the pleasant, so long as we use the word in its habitual sense as what gives rise to pleasurable feelings and therefore refuse to follow Kant’s usage which Bolzano considers unjustified, we can agree that there is a con‑ nection between the pleasant and the beautiful. But Bolzano finds an asym‑ metry here: everything beautiful either gives or can give pleasure but not ev‑ erything pleasureable can be considered beautiful. Moreover, some things are rightly judged beautiful which do not affect the senses at all. As regards the charming, which Bolzano takes as what arouses a certain desire in us, a further asymmetry is to be found. Again the beautiful turns out to be the broader concept in that whilst all beautiful things are charming, not all charming things are beautiful. Bolzano’s comments here are all too brief to be truly convincing. But once we recall that the point of these exclusions is to allow a more unob‑

113

Essay VI

structed view of the concept of the beautiful and not to enter into the kind of detailed investigation of the peculiar overlaps between the beautiful and other, less general concepts already carried out by Kant, I think his brevity here is not objectionable. Bolzano’s next move is to isolate the relevant characteristics of the beautiful. His initial question is not: to what features of the object are our thoughts directed when we perceive it as beautiful? He is concerned rather with the question of how something beautiful brings about a feeling of plea‑ sure in the perceiving subject, about the kind of considerations going on in the perceiving subject’s consciousness which result in – as opposed merely to being accompanied by – a feeling of pleasure. And the phenomenon he settles on is the lightness and rapidity with which certain thoughts occur, such that we experience no need to make ourselves clearly conscious of these thoughts in any strictly conceptual manner. Bolzano’s point is that considering something beautiful is accompanied by a sequence of thoughts moving so quickly and lightly that we are able to follow them through without needing to explicate their contents in any fulfilled way as concepts. A contrasting case might be the consideration of a complex mathematical proof where the sequence of thoughts must be ex‑ plicated conceptually if the proof is to be grasped at all. In both cases there is pleasure, but only in the first case, Bolzano holds, are we properly dealing with pleasure in the beautiful. Two components of the beautiful can therefore be signified as follows: We call an object beautiful if its mere consideration provides us with plea‑ sure, a consideration which we carry out with such a facility that not even in a single case do we need to become conscious of its accompanying thoughts.39

In order to find further components of the beautiful Bolzano now returns to the question which he had earlier postponed, namely to the question as to precisely what it is to which our thoughts might be directed when we find ourselves considering something beautiful. Whatever this feature or features may be, Bolzano, like Kant, wants to hold that our judgment that something is beautiful includes a certain kind of claim of universality. Bolzano tries to specify in a different way than Kant however just what kind of universality is involved here. And he insists on the observation that persons differ in their receptivity to what is beautiful as a function of their education, their powers of understanding, and the rel‑ ative practice they have in exercising these powers. These qualifications he

114



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

holds must be kept in mind if we are to answer the question about what our thoughts are directed to in the consideration of something beautiful. When we consider something beautiful, Bolzano claims, we are involved in asking what kind of thing this something is. In other words, we are look‑ ing for a particular concept or a particular representation or a particular rule which would allow us to deduce the properties of the thing inquestion. Since intuitions here are insufficient by themselves, the kind of representation that is being sought cannot be a simple one but must be complex. When something is considered as beautiful, then, not just intuition but all our intellectual powers must.be involved. And as remarked earlier, mem‑ ory, imagination, understanding, judgment, and reason, must be all of them already developed to some degree and antecedently exercised on beautiful things. Besides the content of our considerations – namely particular concepts, representations or rules – Bolzano tries to specify also the source from which our pleasure in the consideration of beautiful things arises. Here Bolzano holds that whatever increases our natural powers is perceived as pleasure – whereas whatever decreases these powers is perceived as pain. Even our be‑ coming conscious of some natural powers is to be considered as pleasure. The stronger a particular natural power is, the more pleasure we derive from its increase. The pleasure we derive from the consideration of something beautiful, Bolzano continues, does not arise from its utility but from the activation of our various natural and especially intellectual powers. Something beautiful sets these powers to work in such a way that they are neither too little nor too much engaged for no not to be able to notice their growth in power. What we fell then is the increase in our natural intellectual powers. And this feeling brings about pleasure. Bolzano is especially careful to support this part of his theory as if he were ready to acknowledge just how important a role his analysis of the source of aesthetic pleasure will play in his clarificatory definition of the beautiful. Thus, besides providing an interesting description of how this pleasure pro‑ cess is supposed to work, and besides detailing three extended examples which aim to exhibit why we find a spiral, a fable and a riddle beautiful, Bolzano offers what he calls two proofs for his view. The first40 is simply the assertion that our pleasure in the beautiful can be explained on no other general grounds than the case he has cited, for there are numberless cases where no other explanation can be found. Bolzano challen-

115

Essay VI

ges us to explain his previous examples in an equally satisfying way with the help of some other theory than his own. And the second proof he offers41 is that the degree of pleasure which the consideration of something beautiful allows increases directly in proportion to the demands it makes on our intellectual powers. Although each of these ‘proofs’ invites closer attention and although the apparently psychologistic character of parts of his description needs exam‑ ination, nonetheless when placed alongside Bolzano’s individual formulations and examples they do serve will as reinforcements for the well­‑foundedness of his views. With a series of components worked out, and after having reassured himself that the synthesis of just these features will lead to a concept that is neither too narrow nor too broad, Bolzano now moves to formulate his definition of the beautiful. His conclusion might be paraphrased as follows: a beautiful object is one whose consideration by any person with developed intellectual powers results in pleasure. The basis of this pleasure is that it be neither too easy nor too difficult for such a person – who at the moment of perception does not in fact take the trouble to reach conceptual clarity – once some of the object’s properties have been grasped, to form such a concept that would eventually allow him to work out through further consideration its remaining perceptual properties. In the given momenthowever the readiness of his intellectual powers allows the individual to arrive at a “dark intuition.”42 This account is of course a highly condensed once we recall the earlier re‑ flections which led to his formulation I think even some of the more elements become reasonably clear. Bolzano completes his account with two further steps. He first draws certain consequences of his definition and then tries to anticipate the objec‑ tions his definition may provoke. I will deal here with the first only and leave the second for closer scrutiny in the final section of this paper where I raise the question as to just how adequate Bolzano’s theory is. The major consequences, then, are four. This theory is said to allow us to account for the fact that we often cannot express why we find something to be beautiful. For it is the very facility and alacrity of our thinking when consider‑ ing the beautiful object which in part gives rise to the pleasure we experience. Moreover, the theory is also said to allow us to account for the fact that it is especially our two highest senses, of sight and of hearing, that provide us with representations of perceptual beauty. For the senses of smell and taste

116



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

are too uniform to allow us to observe the workings of a particular rule whose discovery sufficiently engages our intellectual powers. A third consequence, Bolzano thinks, is that this theory allows us to understand why a beautiful object can bring us pleasure by offering aspects of itself which we have not previously noticed. For some beautiful things – Bol‑ zano mentions paintings and long poems, – require varied, prolonged, and repeated consideration if all their relevant parts andrelations are to be grasped in an appropriate way. And finally, the theory is said to allow us to understand why different Individuals are responsive to different kinds of beautiful things. For an indi‑ vidual’s response to beautiful things is a function of the development of his or her intellectual powers. So much for the major elements of Bolzano’s theory of the beautiful.

Appraising Bolzano’s Aesthetics If these are the main lines of Bolzano’s investigations of the concept of the beautiful, when then are we to make of them? I want to look first at the crit‑ icism which Bolzano himself anticipated of his work, then at the adequacy of his own criticisms of Kant, and finally at two general features of his theory of the beautiful. Bolzano takes some pains to anticipate a number of objections against his theory and to respond to each in turn. Since one of these turns on the topic of the ugly which I have not had space to consider in this consideration of Bolzano’s theory, I will, deal briefly with the remaining six objections only. The first objection is that the theory presupposes that all beautiful ob‑ jects are complexes comprising dependent parts and their interrelations. But some beautiful objects such as a single tone or a colour are simples. Hence the theory is too narrowly construed. Bolzano’s replies include a number of incidental remarks about percep‑ tion and the science of his day. Although, as he points out, whether or not there are simples was a controversial topic for his contemporaries, in any case neither a single note nor a colour can be taken as without parts. So since the examples fail the question remains open whether the theory is in fact too broad, as alleged. There is however another issue concealed here, to which I shall return later on. A second objection is that Bolzano’s theory presupposes that some com‑ plexes are so difficult to grasp that they cannot count as beautiful objects. Yet the history of the humanities – of, say, classical scholarship – shows that

117

Essay VI

some understanding (for example of the proper sense of archaic lexical items in Greek epigrammatic poetry) allows us finally to perceive this poetry as an instance of something beautiful and yet may require several generations of arduous scholarly work for its realisation. Again, the theory seems to be too narrowly construed in taking only those objects to be beautiful which can be grasped without too much difficul‑ ty. Bolzano replies with a distinction between those considerations which lead up to an apprehension of the object as beautiful and those which accompany that apprehension. The first indeed, as his favourite examples from mathe‑ matics show, may require prodigious and protracted effort. But the second he insists must be neither too facile nor too difficult if the object is to be appre‑ hended as beautiful. A third objection turns on the claim that Bolzano’s theory confuses the beautiful with the regular. But although many rule­‑governed things, such as complicated astronomical clocks, may indeed be beautiful, some beautiful things are not regular at all. Again, the theory seems too exclusive. Bolzano replies that not every kind of regularity is a condition for beauty but only that kind which can be grasped in an anticipatory way without going through with the complete conceptual analysis of the object in question. Con‑ sequently, the theory does leave room for some kinds of beautiful complexes which will, after analysis, show themselves finally not to be rule­‑governed in the sense specified. What is necessary is an initial apprehension of the possibility of rule­ ‑governedness such that a person’s intellectual powers are sufficiently engaged to arouse feelings of pleasure at the idea of their being augmented through continuation of their present activity. A related objection holds that Bolzano’s theory would necessarily con‑ strue the beautiful object as the result of the rule­‑governed activity of the artist or creator. Since however art must arise out of the free interplay of the artist’s perceptual, emotional and intellectual powers, Bolzano’s theory effec‑ tively subjects all artistic activity to the exaggerated constraints of determined rules. And any object which as the result of such activity exhibits this deter‑ mination will displease rather than please. Bolzano replies once again with a distinction, this time the familiar one between the production of a beautiful object and the properties of the object produced. He argues that what is at issue in the definition of the beautiful is not the first but the second only. Nonetheless he grants that however much rule governed activity goes into the production of the beautiful object, those norms must not be exhib‑

118



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

ited as such in the object itself. But this point demands a certain caveat. For there must, according to Bolzano’s theory, be regular relations subsisting among the parts of the beautiful object. These regularities however must not be manifest in such a way that they detract from the perfection of the work as they might well do, for example, were one series of rules to be abandoned for anotherseries half way through the completion of a work. This objection then, although it raises several important issues, is basi‑ cally irrelevant; for what is at issue is now an object appears to us, and not, in the end, the related but different question as to how the object has been produced. A fifth objection focuses on the key terms facility and alacrity in Bol‑ zano’s theory. Here the claim is that the theory leads if not to an absurd at least to an unwelcome conclusion to the effect that the more easily and the more quickly we grasp the regularities which govern the beautiful object, the more beautiful that object must be. The example cited is that of a play; the more easily and quickly we can anticipate its conclusion then, according to the theory, the more beautiful the play. But, to stay with this example alone, such a consequence is unwelcome just because it would privilege the most pedestri‑ an of dramas, say early nineteenth century sentimental comedies, and devalue the best of our tragedies, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus, where an unforeseeable turning point is part of the essence of the play’s success. Bolzano replies with a simple denial that this consequence follows from his theory. To the contrary, he argues, such a result could not follow from a theory which requires above all that a person’s intellectual powers first be sufficiently engaged. But dramas whose opening scene allows us infallibly to predict their outcome are insufficiently complicated to allow of the particular kinds of pleasure which arise from our considerations of beautiful objects. Finally, a last objection (given our limitations here) is that the concept of the beautiful is too widely employed for its definition to include so many elements organised in such a complicated way. For it would seem that virtually all human beings employ some kind of a distinction between the beautiful and the ugly. Moreover this distinction is learned by almost all human beings at an early age. So either the beautiful is in fact a simple concept, or it is one which is at least less complicated than the definition which Bolzano has elaborated so painstakingly must suggest. Bolzano replies by conceding that the concept is used by almost all per‑ sons, but he denies that from this fact alone we must conclude that the con‑ cept is less complicated than his theory makes it out to be. And he cites, in support of this denial, the even more widely employed concepts such as horse,

119

Essay VI

dog, bird, and so on, whose definitions are at least as complicated as the con‑ cept of beauty. These, then, are the objections and the replies which Bolzano imagines with regard to his own theory. Before commenting on the well­‑foundedness of these criticisms however, and upon the adequacy of Bolzano’s replies, I want to make several points about his criticisms of Kant in the light of what we have now seen in some detail about his own theory. Recall, first, that Bolzano criticises Kant generally for offering more than one clarificatory definition of the beautiful. We know from what Bolzano says at the outset of his own treatment of the beautiful that, unlike Kant, he aims instead to provide a single account only.For the beautiful, as Bolzano would have it, is an instance finally of an objective and not of a subjective concept.And objective concepts are to be provided with one, not several definitions. Now this criticism is perhaps more instructive for what it shows us about Bolzano’s intentions than for what it calls attention to in Kant’s own theory. In either case however Bolzano is relying here on complicated discussions of both the nature of concepts and the nature of definition to be found in the Wissenschaftslehre. But when we reread the appropriate materials there, bearing in mind contemporary discussions of such difficult matters, it is not self­‑evident that Bolzano himself has provided an ultimately satisfactory account either of the distinction between subjective and objective concepts 6r of the nature of defi‑ nition. So his general criticism of Kant, in the absence of a more acceptable account of Bolzano’s own assumptions, remains inconclusive. More specifically, we need to recall Bolzano’s criticism of Kant’s use of the cardinal term “interest.” The point of that criticism was that Kant’s dis‑ cussion of disinterestedness depended on an idiosyncratic use of that term for which he nowhere convincingly argued. But Bolzano is here using a two­‑edged sword. I think his criticism of Kant on this point is indeed well­‑founded. But it is a criticism that cuts also in the opposite direction. And the result is that a further question arises as to just how representative Bolzano’s use of his own key terms, really is. Freshly scrutinising his own definition of the beautiful, we quickly find ourselves stumbling on such unfamiliar and unexplained terms as “dark intu‑ ition” or, perhaps more importantly, the critical phrase which keeps turning up in the objections which Bolzano himself anticipated: “die Mühe des deut‑ lichen Denkens.”

120



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

I have tried to shed some light on both of these terms by using the free‑ dom of paraphrase instead of resorting to direct quotation when providing Bolzano’s formulation of the beautiful. But it must be observed that the result is not wholly satisfactory, as can be noted even by simply rereading the para‑ phrase itself. For with all his insistence on tying down his own technical terms and for all his criticism of Kant and others inprecisely this respect, Bolzano does not, at least in the case of his definition of the beautiful, seem finally to have done the job that needed doing. Unlike the first criticism then, Bolzano’s second criticism of Kant does seem well­‑founded: but it suggests thereby at least one serious difficulty with Bolzano’s own theory. Recall further Bolzano’s criticism of Kant’s repeated references to “jeder‑ mann,” in his discussion of the judgment of taste and universality. Bolzano’s basic claim we remember is that Kant cannot mean what he says, for what he says does not seem to be true. It is false that everyone ought to find beautiful what is correctly judged to be beautiful since children and, as Bolzano does not but could have added, mentally disturbed persons, are not always able to concur and indeed cannot be described as persons who should concur. Hence Kant must have meant by “everyone only those individuals who have the full use of their natural and especially intellectual powers. And this provision of course is just the one which Bolzano builds into his own theory. But there is some question here whether Bolzano has correctly under‑ stood Kant on this point. I say “some question” because we need to be careful before ascribing a mistake of this kind to such a careful and thoughtful reader of Kant as was Bolzano. Kant surely does not mean that something which is correctly judged as beautiful will in fact always be correctly judged as beautiful by anyone whom‑ soever. In fact, then, Kant does make room not just for erroneous judgments of taste but also for some persons’ not being able to concur with proper judg‑ ments of taste.The point of Bolzano’s remarks then should be taken here not so much as criticism, but – especially where he talks of ‘developed intellectual powers’ – as an explication of something which Kant had already seen. More interesting however than the question as to how Brentano’s reading of Kant on this point is to be understood, is the question whether Bolzano’s insistence in his own theory of “developed intellectual powers” as a prerequi‑ site for finding something beautiful does not preclude in at least some cogent sense the Kantian requirement of universality. The problem, as I see it, is with the ambiguity in Bolzano’s but not in Kant’s use of the term”’developed.” If Bolzano, with Kant, simply means the proper functionof all the intellectual powers in the mature or potentially ma‑

121

Essay VI

ture individual, then the claim of universality for the correct judgment of taste cannot be rejected in principle. If however Bolzano means, as Kant does not, not only this first sense of “developed” but also the additional sense of mature intellectual powers which have been formed, exercised and refined in the var‑ ious activities associated with the knowledge, practice and pursuit of the arts, then it is very doubtful whether Bolzano can register a claim to universality here, at all. On this second sense of ”’developed,” which Bolzano – at least on the evidence of his own repeated discussions of how necessary the use and exer‑ cise of these powers are for finding something to be beautiful – would seem to hold, no one except the cultivated individual will be able correctly to judge something to be beautiful. Recall, finally, Bolzano’s criticism of Kant’s discussion of purposefulness. We remember that according to Kant we find purposefulness in the beautiful object, whereas Bolzano plainly denies this claim and asserts to the contrary that we find not purposefulness but regularities and rule­‑governedness. Bolzano’s criticism of Kant’s talk of the form of purposefulness is co‑ gent. What calls for reflection however is just what additional reasons there may have been, if not these only, for Bolzano’s abandonment of a quite similar view. For in an 1818 definition of the beautiful as well as in a published aca‑ demic talk to his students discussed by Svoboda, Bolzano himself talked of purposefulness, whereas in his 1843 definition all trace of this talk has gone. This is, however, a largely historical question and, though interesting in its own right for our understanding of the development of Bolzano’s philosoph‑ ical views, it need not detain us here.

Two Critical Questions Before concluding with a brief general assessment, I want to take up two fur‑ ther critical points against the background of these questions about the ade‑ quacy of Bolzano’s own theory of the beautiful. One general difficulty with Bolzano’s theory, I believe, arises out of his initial discussion of the four preparatory points he wants us to keep in mind when judging his own efforts to provide a clarificatory definition of the con‑ cept of the beautiful. This discussion is of course a particularly interesting one, not only be‑ cause of its manifest opposition to idealism, the then overwhelmingly dom‑ inant school in German philosophy, but also because of the succinct form it imposes on several of the key ideas of the Wissenschaftslehre of 1837. Thus,

122



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

there is the untimely insistence on clarity, the aim itself of trying to articulate a definition, and the suggestive but hardly explicated contrast between two kinds of concepts, subjective and objective. Each of these features can be tak‑ en to generate some critical questions in their own right. But most, if not all, such questions can be resolved by closer attentionto related discussions in the Wissenschaftslehre. What does not allow of such a quick resolution however is a theme which is found not only in the preparatory discussion but throughout Bolzano’s major exposition of the concept of the beautiful and even in his extended and critical review of other previously propounded theories of the beautiful. This theme is the distinction between simples and complexes. We recall that this distinction lies at the basis of Bolzano’s insistence that a clarificatory definition of the beautiful must be subjected to different eval‑ uatory criteria depending on whether the beautiful turns out to be a simple or a complex. And ultimately of course Bolzano will hold to the second of these possibilities, namely that the concept of the beautiful is the concept of a complex. And we recall also Bolzano’s appeal to this distinction in a more complicated context when he tries to show that one claim that his theory is too narrowly construed, – that it cannot account for pure tones or pure co‑ lours – is mistaken. But there is a problem here as indeed the second case suggests. And the problem is whether there are any simples at all. Bolzano intimates, in his discussion of the colour case, that the empirical issues involved here remain open, at least for him at the time of writing the treatise in question. But whatever importance the empirical issues might final‑ ly have, the philosophical point that such a distinction can indeed be made out in some sense remains controversial. And this claim, it should be noted, is not a bare assertion but follows from Bolzano’s own hesitations. Some evidential backing for this hesitation is provided, for example, in Bolzano’s discussion of Andre, Hutcheson, andseveral followers of the Leibniz­ ‑Wolff school. There Bolzano criticises their various uses of the terms’manifold’ and ‘unity’. “Even the simplest object,’ Bolzano writes,’has an endless set of characteristics. . .”43 But then, if Bolzano is right on this central point, the question inevi‑ tably arises whether there exist any simples at all. If Bolzano has a serious doubt about the answer to this question, as I think we must assume, then the various and especially the cardinal uses of the distinction between simples and complexes become themselves questionable.Since however this very dis‑ tinction stands at the foundations of Bolzano’s theory of the beautiful, final

123

Essay VI

judgment on that theory must be reserved until closer scrutiny of Bolzano’s understanding of just what simples are can clear up the present doubts. Here, then, is one general difficulty with Bolzano’s theory: the uncertain ontological status of simples. A second general difficulty, I believe, concerns the content of a correct judgment of the beautiful. Recall that Bolzano is adamant in his criticism of Kant’s discussion of purposefulness as the content of the judgment of taste. The content of this judgment, Bolzano asserts, is rather rule­‑governedness. He is however careful to add that this kind of regularity is not apprehended in the judgment of taste with any clarity; rather it is apprehended confusedly, or “‘darkly.” The problem of course is understanding just what it is to which Bolzano is referring in his metaphorical talk of dark apprehensions. Some help may be found in two places: in the early definition of the beau‑ tiful to which I have already alluded,which provides an interesting contrast to Bolzano’s definition in the present work; and in a critical discussion ofa similar concept in Mendelssohn’s Briefe Über die Empfindungen. Bolzano’s earlier definition of the beautiful is to be found in the unpub‑ lished note from 1818 which served as the now lost source material for the entry on “the beautiful” in the 1821 glossary, ‘”olzano’s Begriffe 1821,” now available as a lengthy appendix to E. Winter’s paper, “Die historische Bedeu‑ tung der frühbegriffe Bolzanos.” 44 The relevant passage reads as follows: the beautiful object is one whose purposefulness is of such a nature that it can be recognised even confusedly. This purposefulness is objective. It is related to just what we think of as what brings to the fore the same thoughts which possess this purposefulness…[but] purposefulness must not be too deeply hidden, because otherwise it would only be recognisable through a strenuous reflection which would result in clear judgments.45

What should be added here is a gloss from Bolzano’s early letters on the no‑ tion of a confused or dark judgment. A confused judgment is one which cannot be recalled even after the small‑ est interval and which one could not, even in the very moment of making such a judgment, say ‘I have it.’ Briefly, a dark judgment is one which is not accompanied by the consciousness of having it.46

In other words, the judgment of taste is unclear or confused in the sense that when this judgment is made no consciousness of having made the judgment is also present.

124



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

But there are a number of problems with this dark doctrine. We are not clear, to begin with, as to whether or as to the sense in which Bolzano, like Kant, wants to attempt a clear distinction between the form and the contents of judgments of taste. Further, we are not clear asto whether and if so then just how the contents of a judgment of taste require for their completion an accompanying act of consciousness, that is, a simultaneous awareness, on the part of the individual making a particular judgment of taste, that it is indeed just this judgment which is being made. And of course what contributes to our uncertainty concerning the sense of Bolzano’s doctrine here is our lack of knowledge as to whether the substitution of rule­‑governedness in the defini‑ tion of 1843 for purposefulness in the definition of 1818 entails still further changes in what is to be understood as a ‘confused judgment’. If we turn for further help to the second set of materials, the discussion of Mendelssohn, some clarity does emerge, but not quite enough. There Bol‑ zano suggests that Mendelssohn, when speaking of the unity of the manifold which is apprehended in the judgment of taste, would have better served the truth of the matter had he referred to ‘a clearly recognisable unity’, rather than to a ‘darkly recognised’ one.47 The suggestion here, then, is that the judg‑ ment of taste has as its contents not purposefulness but the rule­‑governedness of a unity whose components precisely in their unity could be grasped in a dis‑ cursive way were one to take the trouble. But since one does not in fact as‑ sume this task of analysis, the relevant unity in its rule­‑governedness is said to be apprehended confusedly, i.e. in a not completely explicated way. This kind of talk, although difficult enough, is, I think, an improvement over the 1818 doctrine; yet it should still fall short of convincing even the most sympathetic of Bolzano’s readers. For we are back again with the diffi‑ culties which confound our attempts to talk of simples. The clear assumption in this doctrine of the “dark judgment” is – as is clearly spelled out in one of Bolzano’s own objections – the view that some‑ thing beautiful is always a complex, a manifold, a rule­‑governed whole whose regularity we apprehend in a confusing but ultimately explicatable way. But the spectre keeps coming back of the thought that some beautiful things, despite Bolzano’s disclaimers, may well turn out to be if not simples then certainly not rule­‑governed manifolds of just the type his theory must presuppose. And this possibility is not too difficult for us to entertain, especially to‑ day, given a large amount of significant work in. the philosophy of science on different models of explanation, when we have become almost instinctive‑ ly chary of unargued assumptions to the effect that talk about regularity, or about law­‑likeness or rule­‑governedness makes sense as it stands.

125

Essay VI

We still, in other words, wrestle with just how to reach agreement about what rule­‑governedness ultimately amounts to. And part of our difficulty is not just the familiar one, which Bolzano above all would recognise, involved in any attempt to construct what he calls an ‘objective concept’ or, in effect, what would today be called a satisfactory account. Part of the difficulty rather is with our still obscure but persistent pre‑ sumptions that, just as there may well seem to be things with more than one essence, or with no essence at all, so too there may well be things which, whilst being ordered in some way, cannot yet be characterised as rule­‑governed. And why should not some of these things be the objects of judgments of taste? Thus despite recourse to additional passages in which he tells us more about this I am afraid that we must conclude, as in the case of his talk about simples and complexes, that Bolzano’s doctrine of the dark judgment is itself a dark doctrine.

Envoi: Towards Realistic Phenomenologies I would like to end with the suggestion that Bolzano’s aesthetics, for all its difficult terms and distinctions, represents a different reading of Kant from those which have been provided either by analytic philosophers such as Beard‑ sley, Dickie, Coleman or Guyer, or by hermeneutic philosophers such as Ga‑ damer, Ricoeur, Biemel or Apel. On the one hand there is an extraordinarily persistent concern for con‑ ceptual clarity, argumentative thoroughness and systematic development, qualities often claimed by analytic philosophers. And on the other hand there is a reliance on a dark doctrine of intuition, apprehension, judgment and fi‑ nally consciousness, which finds certain echoes in hermeneutic philosophy. In no way do I wish to suggest that Bolzano’s work is in some way char‑ acteristic of the best of these two philosophical worlds. Rather, I want to open up for more considered discussion the idea that Bolzano’s reading of Kant, which in many ways generates the peculiar features of his aesthetics, is importantly different from either of the two dominant current interpretations of what is after all the formative period in modern aesthetics: the eighteenth century and its watershed in the work of Kant. It is this other reading of aesthetic theory, the other tradition, if you will, which begins in Bolzano’s theory of the beautiful and which leads on to further investigations to be found in Brentano’s posthumous works, in Mei‑ nong’s analyses of emotional presentation, in Husserl’s preoccupations with

126



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

various versions of psychologism, and finally in the aesthetics of Roman Ingarden. But this is another story, one which both moves beyond the limits of and also – it should be plainly said – loses some of the philosophical fascination of Bolzano’s dark doctrine.48

127

Essay VI

Endnotes 1

This text is a revised version of a paper first published in Linguistic and Literary Studies in Eastern Europe, 7 (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 69–111.

2

B. Bolzano, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik, ed. D. Gerhardus, Frankfurt, 197.2 (hereafter cited as “Bolzano”), p. 16.

3

Glossary, p. 76.

4

For an excellent and very recent survey of Bolzano’s work see E. Morscher, “Ber‑ nard Bolzano”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . See also Y. Bar Hillel’s article in Edwards’ Encyclopedia of Phi‑ losophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967. A bibliography of Bolzano’s writings can be found in volume 2.1 of the Bernard Bolzano Gesamtausgabe, ed. E. Winter, et al., Stuttgart, 1969. Good working bibliographies of material about Bolzano may be found in E. Morscher (cited above), J. Berg, Bolzano’s Logic, Stockholm, 1962, and in E. Hermann, Der religions philosophische Standpunkt Bernard Bolzanos, Uppsala, 1977. See the biography of J. Louzil, Bernard Bolzano, Prague, 1978.

5

Berlin and Libau, 1790; Berlin, 1793; and Berlin, 1799. See Kant, Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. W. Weischedel, Frankfurt, 1968, vol. X (hereafter cited as KU). This edition includes both the so­‑called “Erste Einleitung” (i.e. “Erste Fassung der Einlei‑ tung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft,” pp.9–68) and the „Introduction” (pp. 78–109). See Weischedel’s editorial comments for the relations between this edition and the earlier Akademie­‑Ausgabe. See also Kant, Opuscula Selecta zu Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. G. Tonelli, 3 vols., Hildesheim, 1978, and G. Lehmann, Kants Na‑ chlasswerke und die Kritik der Urteilskraft, Berlin, 1939. For a thorough overview of Kant’s philosophy see P. Guyer, Kant , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), esp. pp. 355–386 on his aesthetics.

6

For several commentaries see J. Julenkampff, Kants Logik des ästhetischen Urteils, Frankfurt, 1978; P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge, Mass.: Har‑ vard UP, 1978; and, on the difficult question of the unity of the Third Critique, see K. Kuypers, Kants Kunsttheorie und die Einheit der Kritik der Urteilskraft, Am‑ sterdam, 1972; G. Tonelli, “La formazionedel testo della Kritik der Urteilskraft,” Revue internationale de Philosophie, 8, 1954, 423–448; and R. K. Elliott,”The Unity of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 244–59.

7

See, among others, D. W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison, Wisconsin: Univesity of Wisconsin Press, 1974), pp.177–78.

128



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

8

See B. Dunham, A Study in Kant‘s Aesthetics: The Universal Validity of Aesthetic Judgment, Lancaster, Pa., 1934, and W. Henckmann, “Über das Moment der Allge‑ meingütligkeit des ästhetischen Urteils in Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft”, Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, ed. L. W. Beck, Dordrecht, 1972, 295–306.

9

See G. Weiler, “Kant’s ‘Indeterminate Concept’ and the Concept of Man,” Revue internationale de Philosophie 16 (1962), 432–46.

10

See S. Axinn, “And Yet: A Kantian Analysis of Aesthetic Interest,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 25 (1964), 108–16.

11

F. X. J. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason: A Study in Kant’s Aesthetics, Pittsburgh, 1974, pp. 66–74.

12

Coleman, p.76.

13

See R. D. Hume, “Kant and Coleridge on Imagination,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1969/70), 485–96.

14

S. Körner, “Kant’s Theory of Aesthetic Taste,” in his Kant, Baltimore, 1955, chap‑ ter 8.

15

See T. E. Uehlihg, The Notion of Form in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, The Hague, 1971.

16

Coleman, p. 61.

17

Coleman, p. 62.

18

KPR, A 146, B 185–86.

19

KU, Allgemeine Anmerkung, 191.

20

On the complicated doctrine of the schematism and the imagination see especially W. H. Walsh, Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics, Edinburgh, 1975, pp. 72–77.

21

My discussion here will be limited to his most important work in aesthetics, Über den Begriff des Schönen: Eine philosophische Abhandlung, which is to be found in a modernised edition in B. Bolzano, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Ästhe‑ tik, ed. D. Gerhardus, Frankfurt, 197.2 (hereafter cited as “Bolzano”). Besides his other essay, “Über die Einteilung der Kunst,” which is also reprinted in Gerhardus, there is virtually nothing else of great importance. Little has been written about Bolzano’s aesthetics and what has been written has been overly sketchy. The one exception, the best work so far on the aesthetics, is the thorough survey article by K. Svoboda, Bolzanova estetika, Rozprovy Československé Akademie Věd, ročník 64, řada sv, sešit 2 (1954), 1–62, which includes a German translation.

129

Essay VI

22

For other aspects of Bolzano‘s relation to Kant see the work by his most gifted student, F. Přihonský, Neuer Anti­‑Kant oder Prüfung der Kritik der reinen Vernunft nach den in Bolzanos Wissenschaftslehre niedergliederten Begriffen, Bautzen, 1850, M. Palágyi, Kant und Bolzano, Halle, 1902, and U. Neeman, „Analytische und syn‑ thetische Sätze bei Kant und Bolzano,” Ratio 12 (1970), 1–20.

23

Besides the works mentioned in note 18 above, there are a number of manuscripts in the National Literature Archives in Prague. A complete catalogue of the Bolza‑ no mss., mainly mathematical, in the Austrian National Library, has been prepared and published in the Gesamtausgabe by Jan Berg. Similarly, a complete catalogue of the Prague mss. has been completed by P. Křivský and M. Pavlíkova, also for inclu‑ sion in the Gesamtausgabe. Previously, the former Czechoslovakian government authorities had repeatedly refused permission for the publication of this catalogue. Bolzano’s other incidental references to aesthetics are discussed very helpfully by Svoboda, pp. 27–33 and 44–56.

24

Bolzano, section 37, p. 65.

25

KU, B 17.

26

Bolzano adds here further interesting comments of ‘good.’

27

From KU, B 32, in Bolzano, section 38, p. 68.

28

KU, B 17, B 21, and B 18 respectively.

29

From KU, B 61, in Bolzano, section 39, p. 72.

30

Bolzano, p. 75.

31

From KU, B 68, in Bolzano, section 39a, p. 78.

32

See KU, B 62.

33

See, for example, KU, B 65 and B 67, and Kant’s talk of ‘universal communicability.’

34

Bolzano, p. 81.

35

Bolzano, p. 6.

36

The Wissenschaftslehre, Bolzano‘s masterpiece, first appeared (after many vicissitu‑ des) with the sub­‑title Versuch einer ausführlichen und grösstentheils neuen Darstellung der Logik mit steter Rücksicht auf deren bisherigen Bearbeiter in four volumes, outside of his own country in Sulzbach, Bavaria in 1837. It has been reprinted three times – Vienna 1882, Leipzig 1914–31, Aalen 1970. Two different selections have been translated into English, one by R. George, Oxford, 1972, and one by B. Ter‑ rell, Dordrecht, 1973. Jan Berg’s introduction to the latter is an excellent overview. The latest translation of the full work by B. Rusnock and R. George is Bernard Bol‑

130



Bolzano’s Dark Realism

zano: Theory of Science, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014). A summary of the first two volumes by one of Bolzano’s collaborators, probably but not certainly Při‑ honský, Kleine Wissenschaftslehre, has been published in an edition by J. Louzil in the Sitzungsberichte der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 299, Vienna, 1975. A shorter summary of the main points by Bolzano himself can be found in the rare book, published anonymously under the title Bolzanos Wissenschaftslehre und Religionswissenschaft in einer beurtheilenden Übersicht, Sulzbach, 1841, which can be consulted in the Prunksaal of the Austrian National Library. 37

Bolzano polemicises often against German idealism. See especially his cri­ ‑ ticism of Hegel’s aesthetics in section 54, pp. 98–108.

38

Bolzano, p. 9.

39

Bolzano, p. 16.

40

Bolzano, section 12, p. 31.

41

In section 13, p. 32.

42

Bolzano, section 14, p. 33.

43

Bolzano, p. 55.

44

Sitzungsberichte der Deutschen Akademieder Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Berlin, 1964, 22–101 (hereafter cited as ‚Glossary‘).

45

Glossary, p. 76.

46

Glossary, pp. 89–90.

47

Bolzano, section 29, p. 56.

48

Work on this paper and related materials has been made possible in part by the Al‑ exander von Humboldt Stiftung and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

131

132

Part Three:

VALUES

133

134

Essay VII: Modernity and Values1 The modern identity is “the ensemble of (largely un‑ articulated) understandings of what it is to be a human agent: the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuali‑ ty, and being embedded in nature which are at home in the modern West.” – Charles Taylor2 “… there may be genuine dilemmas here, that fol‑ lowing one good to the end may be catastrophic, not because it isn’t a good, but because there are others which can’t be sacrificed without evil” (503).

– Charles Taylor3

In essays One and Four, we have looked carefully at contrasting accounts of both the histories of modernity and modernity’s characteristic accounts of belief. In each case we have taken the seminal work of the Canadian philoso‑ pher Charles Taylor as a benchmark against which to measure critically other distinguished accounts. In this essay I return a last time to Taylor’s work. My aim here is to inventory critically a third central aspect of the framework of modernity in which we still do philosophy today if even by opposition, namely modernity’s still very strongly influential accounts of ethical values. In particular, I would like to look more closely at just how Taylor’s own story of the modern identity raises questions about moral frameworks and in‑ comparable goods. And I would also like to consider critically Taylor’s appar‑ ent successes and failures in trying to parse his cardinal notions of qualitative distinctions and moral realism.4

135

Essay VII

Moral Sources As we already noted, one of the most pressing philosophical tasks today, Charles Taylor continues to claim,5 is coming to “a renewed understanding of modernity,” that is, a renewed understanding of what are the “momentous transformations of our culture and society over the last three or four centu‑ ries.”6 He also believes that one central way to accomplish this task is to de‑ scribe the elements and the history of what he calls the modern identity, that is, “the ensemble of (largely unarticulated) understandings of what it is to be a human agent: the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality, and being embedded in nature which are at home in the modern West” (ix). Taylor’s aim is “to show how the ideals and interdicts of this [modern] identity ­‑ what it casts in relief and what it casts in shadow – shape our phil‑ osophical thought, our epistemology and our philosophy of language, largely without our awareness” (ix). And he construes modern identity as exhibiting three facets: an inwardness that allows a certain depth to the self, an affirma‑ tion of ordinary life, and an inner moral source reflected in an expressivist idea of nature. Each facet is explored historically in the order indicated. Whatever con‑ ceptual relations may hold among these elements, Taylor identifies them suc‑ cessively with the Classical and Medieval heritage up to Montaigne, the move from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, and the subsequent move from the Romantic period into the twentieth­‑century. The polemical task is to rescue these elements not only from their de‑ tractors but also from their often less historically informed champions as well. And the basic idea is that what characterizes our identity as moderns today is a more or less diminished or distorted understanding of ourselves, one that does not draw centrally enough on the genuine threads of our fuller cultural and historical context. This complex context today is to be understood mainly in terms of mod‑ ernism. Taylor sees modernism largely as a successor to the romantic empha‑ sis on expression, as a “search for sources which can restore depth, richness, and meaning to life” (495). The key phenomenon is the world of art where the modernist movement has tried to explore the tension between a picture of an inward stream of consciousness and one of a nonetheless decentred subject, a subjectivism and anti­‑subjectivism at the same time (456). The world however partly fashions and partly reflects deep divisions about the moral sources that lie behind our contingent but today virtually un‑

136



Modernity and Values

challenged adherence to such moral goods as freedom and self­‑rule, equality, universal justice, and benevolence (495). These divisions Taylor thinks come from the fragmentation of the original theistic bases for these standards and the proliferation of both “a naturalism of disengaged reason” and an expres‑ sive conception of the creative powers of nature. Although these three diverse domains interconnect, overlap, and are not equally forceful for many individuals today, nonetheless Taylor offers these as a “schematic map” of the moral modern identity. If this is the portrait of the modern identity and these are its most im‑ portant sources, then what are the major consequence of having such a por‑ trait? The point of this picture of the modern identity is to show how the modern identity itself arises from diverse moral sources. These help us under‑ stand at least three characteristic tensions in modern culture. First, there is the problem of moral sources. An uncertainty about consti‑ tutive goods, that is, “something the love of which empowers us to do and be good” (93; 91–107). Second, there is the problem about instrumentalism, the conflict about a conception of reason as disengaged and instrumentalist only. And finally, there is the morality issue, the renewed Nietzchean debate about the mutilating nature of morality. Although Taylor spends most time on the second of these problems and deals with it first, a brief summary of each in the order just given proves helpful. Regarding moral sources, Taylor emphasizes how strongly modern so‑ cieties agree about the importance of such goals as freedom, equality, justice, and benevolence. Consequently, the problem lies not in any disagreement about the norms themselves. The problem concerns rather the reasons that can support such strong moral commitments. Traditionally, these reasons derived mainly either from religious beliefs in the goodness of all creation, or from naturalistic views about the inherent goodness of things. But in view of the portrait Taylor has provided of the modern identity the question arises whether either of these ways of seeing things as good can be sustained any longer. Of these two options Taylor in‑ clines towards the theistic perspective. Whatever its own philosophical weak‑ nesses, such a perspective Taylors thinks is, on balance, less problematic than the naturalistic one (517–18). Besides the tensions between these two perspectives in accounting for the reasonableness of the sources of our moral commitments today, a second set of tensions arises from the view of reason as essentially disengaged and instrumental. When we turn to Taylor’s portrait of the modern identity, we see historically how such a view is subject to attack on two fronts. First, this

137

Essay VII

view of reason and of a certain ideal for a mode of life as well “empties life of meaning” (500). Second, the disengaged, instrumental view of reason “threat‑ ens public freedom, that is, the institutions and practices of self­‑government” (500). The first charge is private. It is effectively experiential – an instrumental‑ ist society, the charge runs, makes too little room if any for “richness, depth, or meaning,” for “heroism, aristocratic virtues, or high purposes in life, or things worth dying for,” for purpose and passion, for magic and the sacred, for reliability resonance and permanence in things. Whether through the shallowness of its images, the facility of its distrac‑ tions, its dissolving force on community, the marginalization of “purposes of intrinsic value,” the disenchantment and neutralization of the world, the division and fragmentation of the individual, the ephemeralization of objects, or the revocability of all commitments, an instrumentalist society can be seen as pernicious. The second charge is public – an instrumentalist society destroys public freedom whether by undermining the will to maintain freedom by atomizing the individual, or by generating “unequal relations of power,” or by mortgag‑ ing the future environment with “ecological irresponsibility” (502). These charges however, instead of invalidating the very idea of disen‑ gaged instrumental reason, set up a tension. On the one hand, the instrumen‑ tal notion of reason calls attention to a certain dignity that reason acquires when it is seen as capable of working effectively in independence from any divine or deist mandate. But at the same time affirming this value of an instru‑ mentalist conception of reason leads to an effective exclusion of too many other genuine goods. This point touches on the core of Taylor’s own view. We must not lose sight of the possibility, he observes, “that there may be genuine dilemmas here, that following one good to the end may be catastrophic, not because it isn’t a good, but because there are others which can’t be sacrificed without evil” (503). So, yes to a notion of disengaged reason, but only if yes as well to a correlative notion of an expressive creative imagination. Thus Taylor believes that his portrait of the modern identity enables us to see better how one­‑sided a repudiation is, however strong the attacks may be, of either aspect of the modern understanding of reason. His idea is that we need to affirm the package and not just one of its items. And he finds in the Frankfurt School, especially in Adorno’s work, a certain ideal: “a notion of integral expressive fulfilment in which the demands of sensual particularity would be fully harmonized with those of conceptual reason, and in which the

138



Modernity and Values

domination and suppression of the former by the latter would be overcome. This remains a critical standard, even where it cannot be integrally realized” (506). But Taylor finds even this position too narrow in its enlightenment ex‑ clusions of both theistic perspectives and those non­‑anthropomorphic per‑ spectives often on view in modern art, those that go beyond strictly subjec‑ tivist views. Rather, the emphasis in modern art on such expressivist ideals as “self­‑expression, self­‑realization, self­‑fulfilment, and discovering authentici‑ ty” (507) for Taylor presupposes non­‑anthropomorphic goods. These are goods larger than merely the individual and his fulfilment and not just subjectivist values. His argument is that, were the situation other‑ wise, “a total and fully consistent subjectivism would tend towards emptiness: nothing would count as a fulfilment in a world in which literally nothing was important but self­‑fulfilment” (507). While rejecting these successive views as overly narrow Taylor gradually demarcates an area where he can articulate if not develop and argue positively his own view. This domain Taylor sees as a locus of moral sources. It is a place where the different scientific, practical, and expressive activities of human beings emanate. And he construes this domain as “an order” that is neither merely subjective nor merely objective. Such an order Taylor understands mainly in terms of what he calls “the search for moral sources outside the subject through languages which reso‑ nate within him or her, the grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision” (510). In the absence of any reliable public access to a “cosmic order of meanings” the sole measure at our disposal today for ex‑ ploring this kind of order, Taylor believes, lies in the resonance certain images like “epiphany,” “moral sources,” “disengagement,” “empowering,” and so on set up within personal inquiry (512). Accordingly kinds of inquiry like those in so much philosophy today that set aside the exploration of this kind of discourse cannot succeed: “the subject doesn’t permit language which escapes personal resonance” (512). In this larger context then the consequence of Taylor’s portrait of the modern identity is that the constitutive goods in the modern world – free‑ dom, equality, justice, benevolence – are seen to allow of further explication only with the help of new idioms of personal resonance (513). Such idioms must resist the competing claims of a merely empiricist epistemology that enshrines a disengaged and instrumentalist conception of the reasonable self­ ‑responsible subject. And they must also resist the claims of a non­‑empiricist

139

Essay VII

epistemology given over entirely to the exclusive conception of a completely dependent self with its reason empowered by a spark of the divine. The task is to forge a critical language of personal resonance that en‑ compasses radically competing constitutive goods in both a responsive and responsible whole. This is still the task in his most recent and ongoing work. Besides however the problem about moral sources and about instrumen‑ talism, a third and final set of issues clusters around the problematic notion of morality. Here too Taylor believes that his portrait of the modern identity has important consequences. The crucial tension here is between naturalism and spiritualism. An exaggerated emphasis on the absolute primacy of certain cen‑ tral constitutive goods, for example spiritual ideals, can entail a radical rejec‑ tion of what are just as central life goods. Conversely, a naturalist insistence on the absolute primacy of certain life goods, for example family life, can entail just as radical a rejection of such crucial constitutive goals as respon‑ siveness to the spiritual. Whether wars of religion waged by Christian knights or wars of liberation waged by atheist militants – in each case the human cost has proved unconscionable. Taylor argues that in each of these extreme cases, and even in that of the more measured scientific sobriety of a neo­‑Lucretian humanism, a cardinal error recurs. The error is the belief “that a good must be invalid if it leads to suffering or destruction” (519). Taylor holds a different view. Some potentially destructive ideals both can and are directed to genuine goods. Even more strongly, he suggests that most of the visions that promise to spare us the long task of thinking through these choices between the “spiritual lobotomy” of merely naturalistic perspectives or the “self­‑inflicted wounds” of merely transcendent ones finally came to “selective blindness”(520). Taylor thinks however that this dilemma concerning the equally unac‑ ceptable consequences of either a blinkered secularism or a mutilated spritu‑ alism is not inevitable. Rather, the attempt to think through such a dilemma from inside a culture that for historical and structural reasons stifles the spirit should be a work of liberation. At the end of his 1989 book he writes: “If the highest ideals are the most potentially destructive, then maybe the prudent path is the safest, and we shouldn’t unconditionally rejoice at the indiscriminative retrieval of empowering goods. A little judicious stifling may be the part of wisdom. The prudent strategy makes sense on the as‑ sumption that the dilemma is inescapable, that the highest spiritual aspi‑ rations must lead to mutilation or destruction. But … I don’t accept this

140



Modernity and Values

as our inevitable lot. The dilemma of mutilation is in a sense our greatest spiritual challenge, not an iron fate” (520–521).

Moral Frameworks In trying to provide a portrait of the modern identity, to map its major con‑ ceptual contours, Taylor thinks that the different stands of what it means to be a human agent have to be seen both analytically and developmentally. The major obstacle in carrying through such an ambitious plan is gener‑ ally the practice of contemporary moral philosophy, particularly its narrow fo‑ cus on rights and obligations to the exclusion of sustained reflection on goods and the good life. Without enlarging this focus Taylor believes we cannot re‑ trieve some of the essential components in the modern identity which are often available only within different linguistic idioms than philosophers today usually explore. Perhaps the most neglected component here is what Taylor calls our spiritual nature and predicament that is part of the background of many of our moral intuitions. Taylor glosses the key word “spiritual” here by contrasting the narrow notion of moral issues with the broader one of spiritual issues. Spiritual is‑ sues involve “strong evaluation, that is … discriminations of right and wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (4). Thus whereas moral issues concern such matters as integrity, dignity, well­‑being, and so forth, spiritual ones centre on the independent standards by which these goods are judged as worthwhile and fulfilling. However universal they may appear, our moral intuitions in fact are closely tied to our historical and cultural contingencies. The spiritual issues these intuitions touch on however are implicated in what Taylor calls “a given ontology of the human” (5), including a set of “real properties with criteria independent of our de facto reasons” that characterize some things as “fit objects of moral respect” (6). Such properties, although similar in their gen‑ erality to the critical predicates of modern science, are not to be established in similar ways. That is to say, we cannot articulate spiritual properties by adopting a neutral stance that is independent of our reaction to certain central experiences of human life. Articulating a moral ontology must proceed from our deepest moral in‑ stincts rather than from any neutral stance. For example, to understand more

141

Essay VII

fully what it means to say that all human beings are worth of respect, “you have to call to mind what it is to feel the claim of human suffering, or what is repugnant about injustice, or the awe you feel at the fact of human life” (8). Thus, Taylor aims at describing the moral ontology behind our deepest moral and spiritual intuitions today. A satisfactory articulation is a satisfactory answer to the question: “what is the picture of our spiritual nature and predicament which make sense of our responses?” where “make sense” comes to articulating “the background we assume and draw on in any claim to rightness …“ (8–9). Further, such an articulation involves “identifying what makes something a fit object for them [our responses] and correlatively formulating more fully the nature of the response as spelling out what all this presupposes about ourselves and our situation in the world” (8–9). What complicates this task is the fact that people have different moral ontologies in the sense of different reasoned ways of justifying their deepest moral and spiritual intuitions. Moreover, such ontologies are most often im‑ plicit. Further, some explicit moral ontologies are often at odds with implicit ones. Again, many of the moral intuitions that presuppose these ontologies are themselves very unclear with the consequence that individuals are not able to identify unequivocally the background moral ontology as for example either secular or theistic. Finally, some moral ontologies require reformulation in the way Plato’s does, whereas others require the series of qualitative distinctions to be always at work although not to be formulated as for example in an ar‑ chaic warrior ethic.

Moral Identities For Taylor, three central stands come together in the peculiarly modern, and Western, moral identity. The first consists of “our sense of respect for and obligations to other persons.” This strand itself is complex implicating legal notions of respect as based on subjective, natural, and inalienable rights, of autonomy, individual freedom to develop one’s capacities as one chooses, the avoidance of suffer‑ ing, the promotion of human welfare, and the affirmation of the ordinary life of work (production) and family (reproduction). A second strand includes those concerns that are larger than the merely moral, the spiritual concerns about what makes a life worth living, what makes

142



Modernity and Values

a life one of fulfilment and completion. In each of those concerns we are to understand that “strong evaluation” is at work. And a third strand comprises the many concerns that cluster round the notion of dignity, “the characteristics by which we think of ourselves as com‑ manding (or failing to command) the respect of those around us,” in the sense of their attitude to think well of us (15). My “dignity” then is the sense I have of myself “as commanding (attitudinal) respect” (15). Whatever their understanding, relation, and relative importance in a par‑ ticular culture, all three – dignity, the spiritual, and respect for others – Taylor takes as “probably” present in every culture. In the modern moral identity the first of these strands is paramount and is understood in detail, whereas the second is felt to be especially threatened with what Max Weber memorably called the disenchantment of the modern world. With the disappearance of certain traditional horizons, frameworks of meaning have become insistently problematic in the sense that no framework “can be taken for granted as the framework” (17). One central consequence is the intuition that whatever meaning might make our lives worth living in the strong evalutive sense is one, whether we find or make it, that we must articulate for ourselves. Another is that the lack of an agreed upon framework in the light of which one can warrant claims to be leading a meaningful life characterizes what is peculiar to the modern predicament – an existential fear of meaninglessness that “perhaps defines our age” (18). Taylor recognizes that he needs to provide here a fuller description of what a framework is. For much contemporary philosophical discussion, still strongly marked by a naturalistic and scientific orientation, has little patience with apparently loose talk of such unwieldy and intractable concerns as “the meaning of life.” So, living within such a framework comes to functioning “with the sense that some action, or mode of life or mode of feeling is incom‑ parably higher than the others which are more readily available to us.” Here, “higher” can mean many things whether fuller or deeper or more admirable and so on (19). What unites these differences is the notion of a species of goods that is incomparable with, that is not measurable on the same scale as, other goods. These incomparably higher goods are just those that “command our awe, re‑ spect, or admiration.” They involve strong evaluations in the sense of their being independent of our desires and choices, and of their representing “stan‑ dards by which these desires and choices are judged” (20).

143

Essay VII

A key example of a modern framework is what Taylor calls “the frame‑ work of self­‑mastery through reason. This is “the ideal of the disengaged self, capable of objectifying not only the surrounding world but also his own emo‑ tions and inclinations, fears and compulsions, and achieving thereby a kind of distance and self­‑possession which allows him to act ‘rationally’” (21). Reason here in its modern guise “is defined procedurally, in terms of instrumental efficacy, or maximization of the value sought, as self­‑consistency” (21). Similar modern frameworks incorporating incomparably higher goods include secular variants of an ethics of altruism as involving a transformation not of reason but of the will. Also included is an ethics of that imaginative vision and expressive power that is indispensable to the very fashioning of a framework. Another is an ethics of ordinary life that identifies the higher good as the way or manner in which work and family are lived whatever the tensions affirming that ordinariness sets up in the modern identity. But part of the modern identity in the reductive reflex of many materi‑ alists and utilitarian philosophers today includes the strong challenge to the existence of anything like what Taylor wants to call “a framework.” Taylor is sensitive to the many nuances of such a temper. He argues how‑ ever that even the rejection itself of frameworks involves a framework in his sense. For what motivates such rejections is a set of moral reasons some of which are taken to be “incomparably higher goods “regardless of where these goods are situated. The denunciation of the very idiom of a framework, the argument seems to run, entails the affirmation of an alternative that if genuine must include the essential elements that comprise what Taylor means by “a framework.” These are simply “inescapable frameworks.” Just how successful this argument is however is questionable. Whether frameworks exist or not, however, that is, whether there are the kind of “qualitative discriminations of the incomparably higher” that Taylor insists provide the explicit or implicit backgrounds for our moral judgements, intuitions, or reactions, a further question arises. Is adopting a framework merely optional and ultimately dispensable (26)? Taylor holds that it is impossible to do without such frameworks or hori‑ zons. Such horizons, he thinks, are “constitutive of human agency” (27), and they “must include strong qualitative discriminations” (32). To make his case Taylor turns to a discussion of the fraught matter of personal identity. He thinks that personal identity is defined in important and central ways by what a person understands to be of crucial importance. But those most fundamental commitments that allow the person to know where he or she stands with respect to such matters of crucial importance

144



Modernity and Values

themselves constitute a horizon or frame. For in its absence “they wouldn’t know anymore, for an important range of questions, what the significance of things was for them” (27). Hence Taylor holds for an “essential link” between a framework and personal identity – a framework provides an orientation in what Taylor calls “moral space” (28), a space worked out by qualitative dis‑ criminations. Moreover, such a space exists independently of whether a person suc‑ ceeds in orienting himself or herself satisfactorily. The key idea thus is that persons do not invent the qualitative distinctions at issue here; they adopt them or not (30). Taylor concludes: “it belongs to human agency to exist in a space of questions about strongly valued goods, prior to all choice or adven‑ titious cultural change” (31). Now this type of account is designed to show up the untenability of any naturalist rejection of the inescapableness of frameworks. It is an account Taylor calls both “phenomenological” and “transcendental” (32). The phe‑ nomenology covers the descriptive character of the account, while the tran‑ scendental refers to “an explanation of the limits of the conceivable in human life” (32). This turns out to be less grandiose than its naturalist opponent might suppose. For the point of such an account is “to examine how we actually make sense of our lives, and to draw the limits of the conceivable from our knowledge of what we actually do when we do so” (32). Its result is the claim that, in order to stand somewhere on issues about the good, the self must “orient itself in a space of questions about the good” (33). Taylor goes on to characterizes more fully the notion of the self to which he is trying to draw attention. Thus, he contrasts it with various uses of the term “self ” in psychology and sociology. Further, he distinguishes the self sharply in four different respects from the objects of scientific study. The re‑ sult is that the self is not to be understood as an object at all, but as something existing within “webs of interconnection” (36). Thus, personal identity here exhibits the double dimension of something definable with respect to its per‑ spective on certain spiritual concerns and to its essential bonds with a certain community. The second of these two elements Taylor believes has become occluded because of the exaggerated importance the modern era attaches to individual‑ ism. Yet the very nature of language learning and use exhibits the necessity of essential ties holding between the self and others, between the private and the public, the individual and community.

145

Essay VII

Thus the very nature of the constitutive goods that Taylor is anxious to articulate are closely connected with our sense of ourselves as not confined to a solitary subjectivist standpoint, but ineluctably implicated especially by our use of language in a living web of interconnections. The analogy about orientation to the good leads Taylor to a second as‑ pect of his concerns. For the orientation to the good requires both a frame‑ work that “defines the shape of the qualitatively higher” as well as “a sense of where we stand in relation to” the qualitatively higher (42). This second aspect recalls the second axis or dimension of strong eval‑ uation that Taylor discussed earlier, namely the issues that cluster around the question of what makes a life meaningful. However great the variance here is from one individual and culture to another, Taylor believes that being concerned with where one is situated with respect to the qualitatively higher goods in one’s life is “not an optional matter.” Rather, “the goods which de‑ fine our spiritual orientation are the ones by which we will measure the worth of our lives” (42). Taylor proceeds on to provide an extended description of how such con‑ tact with these goods assumes a variety of guises in different forms of life. In each of these situations however Taylor returns to his main claim – “that all frameworks … place us before an absolute question … framing the context in which we ask the relative questions about how near or how far we are from the good” (43). The absolute question is the yes or no question as to whether the di‑ rection of our lives is oriented to the good at all. And it is a question Tay‑ lor believes that not only may arise – it must arise (46). His argument here well summarizes his point. “Since we cannot do without an orientation to the good, and since we cannot be indifferent to our place relative to this good, and since this place is something that must always change and become, the issue of the direction of our lives must arise for us” (47). In addition to this complex orientation to the good as the comparably higher, identity also requires one further and for now final element – an evolv‑ ing self­‑understanding that assumes the form of a narrative – “we grasp our lives in a narrative” (47). Although this element has been widely explored in recent work especial‑ ly, Taylor wants to place renewed emphasis on the temporal dimensions of identity that narrative structures bring out. Thus, identity has an orientation and a directedness as we have seen. But it also has a past, present, and future or in other terms a beginning, middle and end.

146



Modernity and Values

This temporal dimension in the narrative grasp of one’s identity reinforc‑ es Taylor’s impatience with influential contemporary views of the self that leave out any understanding of the self as dynamically situated in a context of moral questions and concern. Construing the self after Locke and Hume pre­‑eminently in terms of self­‑awareness only overlooks both the moral situ‑ atedness of the self and its incessant narratives about meaning. Selves, Taylor argues, “are not neutral, punctual objects; they exist only in a certain space of questions, through certain constitutive concerns” (50). But this understanding of the self is essentially linked to the need for self­ ‑understanding through narrative forms, the stories we continue to tell our‑ selves about our pasts and our futures. Taylor summarizes: “because we can‑ not but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably under‑ stand our lives in narrative form …” (51–52). We make sense of our lives in stories.

Moral Articulacy In examining the backgrounds of our moral intuitions, Taylor tries to focus these backgrounds in terms of a “moral ontology” that awards a central place to qualitative distinctions, incomparable goods rather than values. This ontol‑ ogy has presuppositions which when taken together may be construed as the frameworks that these qualitative distinctions define. Thus the distinctions define our orientations in an ethical space con‑ sisting of “questions about the good,” while the frameworks themselves “ar‑ ticulate our sense of orientation” in that space. More sharply, the qualitative distinctions are “defining orientations,” “contestable answers to inescapable questions” (41). As such, these distinctions have a cardinal role “in defining our identity and making sense of our lives in narrative” (53). A further question arises now about the relation between these qualita‑ tive distinctions and their additional role in providing “reasons for our moral and ethical beliefs” (53). But spelling out this role is difficult, Taylor holds, because of the continuing sway in contemporary philosophical reflection of naturalist “prejudices.” These naturalist prejudices strongly suggest that at‑ tempts like Taylor’s to discover values in the world as opposed to describing such values as subjective projections only are seen as falling prey to the “nat‑ uralistic fallacy.”

147

Essay VII

The general line of reflection that would oppose Taylor’s approach has two variants. The first turns on the idea of discriminating between a descrip‑ tive and an evaluative level in our use of value terms with the consequence that the voluntary projection of values can be brought under rational control. The second version holds that such a projection is finally involuntary. The consequence is that values become analogous to secondary properties like co‑ lour which the neutral universe inescapably seems to exhibit despite modern science’s demonstrations that values are not part of the world. In each case the task is to offer extensionally equivalent descriptive accounts of value terms only. Following Bernard Williams’s lead however Taylor defends his insistence on the naturalness of values in two ways. He argues against the possibility of separating “descriptive” from evaluative meanings for a whole range of im‑ portant value terms. And he contests the analogy between secondary proper‑ ties and value terms. For Taylor, seeing “the evaluative point of a given term” involves some‑ thing very different from deploying a suspect distinction or exploring a mis‑ leading analogy. What is required is “an understanding of the kind of social in‑ terchange” for a particular society where the given term is current, and a grasp of how persons in such a society make use of qualitative distinctions (54). Although often one kind of understanding is sufficient to see the point of an evaluative term, more often both kinds of understanding dovetail. These interlocking considerations motivate Taylor to reject any natural‑ ization of the goods that value terms evoke whether by assimilation of moral terms to optional matters of opinion, or as here by translation of moral views into descriptive equivalents. In short, for Taylor “our language of good and right make sense only against a background understanding of the forms of social interchange in a given society and its perceptions of the good …” (56). That is, values are entirely independent neither of the world nor of human societies and cultures; they are neither entirely subjective and relative nor en‑ tirely objective and non­‑relative.

The Best Account Principle Taylor comes now to the introduction of perhaps his most central precept, what he calls the best account principle. He introduces this principle for the first time as a rhetorical question.

148



Modernity and Values

“What better measure of reality do we have in human affairs than those terms which on critical reflection and after correction of the error we can detect make the best sense of our lives? ‘Making the best sense’ here in‑ cludes not only offering the best, most realistic orientation about the good but also allowing us to understand and make sense of the actions and feel‑ ings of ourselves and others” (57).

To make sense of our lives, Taylor believes, requires explaining behaviour from both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective. More precisely, we need both third­‑person explanations and first­‑person non­‑explanatory understanding. In turn, such explanations and understandings require terms without which one is not able either to grasp what others actions involve or to grasp what my own deliberations about action involve. Some terms then are indispensable not just for explanation but for self­ ‑understanding as well, whereas others are required for one or the other but not for both. Any attempt to dismiss a term that is indispensable for self­ ‑understanding just because one can dispense with it for explanatory purposes is therefore seriously deficient. To make sense of our lives we must use terms that span “the whole range of both explanatory and life uses” (58). Such terms are the very ones that must be central, in an ongoing provisional and corrigible way, in the best account I can provide of my situation. To clarify, Taylor formulates a “potential attack” on those views that in‑ corporate “a basically non­‑realist position about the strongly valued goods” he wants to champion. His attack comprises three phases and arises from both a “moral phenomenology” and a reflection on what he takes as “inescapable features of moral language” (68). First, for deliberating, judging, deciding, explaining and understanding oneself and others, one must have recourse to strongly valued goods. Second, such goods are “real” in the central sense that “what you can’t help having recourse to in life is real” – moral experience supports realism in the sense that, unlike non­‑realism (Williams), quasi­‑realism (Blackburn), or projectiv‑ ism (Mackie), strongly valued goods are not just compatible with our moral experience but are most relevant to that experience. Finally, any attempt to combine both the insistence on some domain of strong evaluation where moral obligation holds on perhaps sociobiological or consequentialist grounds and the non­‑realist picture of strongly valued goods as projections or whatever cannot work. Even if some rules for survival and general happiness are described in terms of widely held ends, strictly speaking these rules do not yield moral obligation (59–60).

149

Essay VII

The upshot of this polemic is the recognition that strongly valued goods are not only inescapable; they are also ranked. Persons recognize a plurality of such values. But in establishing their own identity they establish a direction to one of these values as preeminent. This particular good – whether fame or experience fulfilment or good or justice – becomes the touchstone of the person’s sense of wholeness. Thus one good enjoys a “qualitative discontinuity” with respect to other goods that also move the individual person. “A higher­‑order qualitative dis‑ tinction … segments goods which themselves are defined in lower­‑order dis‑ tinctions” (63). These higher­‑order goods Taylor calls “hypergoods” – “goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about” (63). For Taylor, the recognition of such hypergoods is what defines the mor‑ al. Conflicts about the moral are conflicts about hypergoods. And when one hypergood historically supersedes an earlier one we have the radical change in our appreciation of the value of previous hypergoods, a change Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values. But what of the hypergoods themselves? What is their nature? Taylor answers: “the logic of, e.g., virtue terms like courage or generosity is such that they have to be construed as picking out projectible properties, just as “red” or “square” do, an essential feature of which is precisely this value” (68). His position here is a response to the underlying question: “How else to determine what is real or objective, or part of the furniture of things, than by seeing what properties or entities our best account of things has to in‑ voke?” (68). He formulates his approach even more clearly in what follows: “If we cannot deliberate effectively, or understood and explain people’s action illuminatingly, without such terms as ‘courage’ or ‘generosity,’ then these are real features of the world” (69). This is precisely the use of the best account principle to determine one’s ontology. What is “ineliminable” is what is real. Hypergoods play the special role in our moral thinking of not just help‑ ing in the task of defining one’s personal identity but also of providing rea‑ sons in the sense of “an articulation of what is crucial to the shape of the moral world in one’s best account” (76). Yet “articulating a vision of the good is not offering a basic reason” (77), which is something external rather than the im‑ manent process of making explicit what is basic to our ethical choices. Rather, articulating the qualitative distinctions that inform a vision of the good comes to “setting out the moral point of the actions and feelings our intuitions en‑ join on us, or invite us to or present as admirable” (78).

150



Modernity and Values

The major obstacle, Taylor insists, to recognizing these truths about our situation is the naturalistic temper that is so much an essential part both of modern culture in general and of modern moral philosophy in particular. A key example is utilitarianism that accords happiness, benevolence, and ra‑ tionality the status of hypergoods without recognizing these incomparably higher goods as values. Further, the stress on the sciences as the paradigm form of knowledge, the narrow construal of morality in terms of a guide to action only, and the specification of a moral theory’s task as “defining the context of obligation rather than the nature of the good life” – all conspire to leave no place to the good either in the sense of the good life or in the sense of what is “the object of our love or allegiance” (79). The consequences are clear – “moral philoso‑ phies so understood are philosophies of obligatory action. Accordingly, the central task of moral philosophy becomes accounting for what generates the obligations that hold for us. A satisfactory moral the‑ ory is then thought to be one that defines some criterion or procedure which will allow us to devise all and only the things we are obliged to do” (79). Providing basic reasons for criteria that pick out obligatory actions has come to take precedence over articulating qualitative distinctions in a language of “thick descriptions”, i.e. rich, culturally bound descriptions that articulate “the significance and point that the actions or feelings have within a certain culture” (80). Similarly a procedural conception of ethical thinking has taken precedence over a substantive view – what counts in ethical thinking is not whether one has a current view of qualitatively different goods but whether one has come to one’s view by rational argumentative thinking. Thus, the peculiar combination in modern moral theory particularly of a naturalist temper with certain epistemological, metaphysical, and moral ideas leads to a “pragmatic contradiction whereby the very goods which move them push them to deny or denature all such goods” (88). The result is that too many modern moral theories “narrow our focus to the determinants of action and then restrict our understanding of these determinants still further by defining practical reasoning as exclusively procedural. They utterly mag‑ nify the priority of the moral by identifying it not with substance but with a form of reasoning around which they draw a firm boundary” (89). But however articulate these views, a further question arises here: What is the point of articulacy about the good? Taylor thinks that any particular vision of the good only comes to us through some kind of articulation. “A vision of the good becomes available for the people of a given culture through being

151

Essay VII

given expression in some manner … articulation is a necessary condition of adhesion; without it, these goods are not even options” (91). But why must articulacy take a narrow linguistic form when so much of our sense of the good finds expression in non­‑linguistic forms such as reli‑ gious ritual or artistic representation? Answering this question leads Taylor to sharpen several of his key distinctions between strong and constitutive goods. Strong goods we have seen are taken as “whatever is picked out not as incomparably higher in a qualitative distinction” (92), but goods which are part and parcel of a good life, or “life goods.” Examples are universal justice, freedom, self fulfilment. Some strong goods however are what they are because of their intrin‑ sic reference to some still fuller good. These goods Taylor calls constitutive goods in the sense of their being a moral source, “something the love of which empowers us to do and be good” (93). Examples include Plato’s Idea of the Good or the personal God of Christianity. These constitutive goods both de‑ fine a substantive content for moral theory and empower those who adhere to such contents “to love what is good.” Constitutive goods moreover need not be external if they are to be moral sources. Thus Kant’s understanding of rational agency for Taylor is an internal constitutive good that functions as a moral source in exhibiting a distinctive dignity that inspires awe and “empowers us morally” (94). More generally, the contemplation of constitutive goods engenders a profound respect “which respect in turn empowers whatever fills this role as playing the part of a moral source” (94). In this light one can see that even modern strictly immanent humanism, say Camus’ sense of human dignity being rooted in the courageous capacity of human beings to confront a meaningless universe, even such humanisms, that reject any constitutive goods or moral sources still include analogous elements, in this example unbowed human dignity. Yet the climate of modern moral philosophy leads us, Taylor thinks, to overlook the presence of moral sources, to leave them unaddressed. The issue of linguistic articulacy then comes down to the central im‑ portance Taylor ascribes to retrieving and redescribing the overlooked and unaddressed moral sources. These are the constitutive goods particularly of our modern immanentist moral humanism, the directions as he writes of Iris Murdoch’s work “of attention and desire through which alone … we can be‑ come good” (96). His case for the centrality of linguistic articulacy goes like this. “Moral sources empower. To come closer to them, to have a clearer view of them, to

152



Modernity and Values

come to grasp what they involve, is for those who recognize them to be moral to have or respect them, and through this love/respect to be better enabled to live up to them. And articulation can bring them closer. That is why words can empower; why words can at times have tremendous moral force … the most powerful case is when the speaker, the formulation, and the act of delivering the message all line up together to reveal the good …“ (96). For Taylor such cases most often assume the forms of narrative. Taylor recognizes that one of the strains in modern thought is to eschew articulation with respect to precisely the most important matters that seem rather to enjoin a silence. And there are many good reasons that support being silent. But Taylor thinks that “the silence of modern philosophy is unhealthy” largely because of its invalid “repudiation of qualitative distinctions and rejec‑ tion of constitutive goods as such”(98). Just because of the sway of modern moral philosophy and its prejudices, the injunction of silence should give way to a different task. That task is one of articulating the good, of investing the hidden and unacknowledged moral motives of modern moral philosophy, and of formulating “the visions of the good that actually underlie our moral reactions, affinities, and aspirations” (100). This is the task that needs to be undertaken both with respect to the mainstream moral theories of our times like naturalism and utilitarianism and various neo­‑Nietzschean perspectives like Foucault’s. The irrevocable negative judgments these philosophies entail about some of the most central of our moral sources today require that their silent inspi‑ ration be examined. So long as silence is enjoined, “this inspiration is hidden, where it can’t come up for debate” (103). Articulating these implicit inspirations Taylor believes means that one needs “to invent language here, rather presumptuously claiming to say bet‑ ter than others what they really mean” (103). But the approach must also be historical, a recourse to the past, especially with respect to modern naturalist views “in order to get some model of the kind of sense of the good which is still openly avowed by them but is suppressed from awareness now” (104). Articulacy then must be both linguistic and historical. And since articu‑ lacy is focused here on what remains implicit in modern moral philosophical perspectives, the accent needs to fall not just on explicit philosophical the‑ ories but on mentalities as well. “To trace the development of our modern visions of the good … is also to follow the evaluation of unprecedented new understandings of agency and selfhood” as well as our conceptions of society and kinds of narratives and narrativity (105).

153

Essay VII

The good that follows on this kind of both linguistic and historical ar‑ ticulacy is a reconciliation within ourselves and our societies of many of the moral conflicts of our age by a recognition of “the full range of goods we live by” (107). This recognition Taylor sees as the result of “a search for a way in which our strongest aspirations towards hypergoods do not exact a price of self­‑mutilation” (106–7). The idea is to win through to a release of the em‑ powering forces that the range of our actual moral sources include. Accord‑ ingly, “articulacy is a crucial condition of reconciliation” (107).

Envoi: Stepping Back When we step back, however slowly and sympathetically but critically, from such an extensive range of inquiry across the sources of the moral portraits of modernity, we recognize that more still needs to be said. And, indeed, Taylor has tried to say it. And as his most recent work amply show he is still trying to say it. Here we have looked in detail only at his understanding of moderni‑ ty and ethical values. And in the two previous essays on Taylor’s work we have also taken up his views of modernity and history and on modernity and beliefs. His most recent views on full human linguistic capacities in light of post­‑Romantic theories of language, strongly controversial views I think, still await sustained critical examination. But critical assessments aside, what Taylor leaves us with most centrally is the task of getting on with our own philosophical works. What his own achievements have demonstrated however is, among other things, that we cannot get on properly with parsing our own themes without fundamen‑ tally rethinking our all too often still not satisfactorily enough unexamined assumptions about the modernist frameworks of history, belief, and values. Without such ongoing critical rethinking of such frameworks whatever philo‑ sophical works we ourselves would hope to suggest for others and their com‑ munities cannot be other than unsatisfactory themselves.

154



Modernity and Values

Endnotes 1

This is a much revised version of a paper that first appeared under the title “Under‑ standing Modernity” in the Canadian philosophy journal Elutheria 2 (1990), 3–14.

2

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989), Preface, ix.

3

Ibid., p. 503.

4

For a somewhat different perspective on this multi­‑faced work see M. Nussbaum’s early review in The New Republic, April 9, 1990.

5

See for example Taylor’s present project, a two volume work on the human linguis‑ tic capacity, Romantic theories of language, and post­‑Romantic poetics, of which the first volume appeared as The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard UP, 2016).

6

Ibid., See also the interview with C. Taylor in The Idler, January­‑February, 1990. Further references to this major work are enclosed in parentheses within the body of the text.

155

156

Essay VIII: Cultural and Religious Identities1 We all in fact belong to several different overlapping communities – some hierarchical, others not – that are essential to our identity. Some of our relationships to these communities are ‘ascribed,’ that is, not the re‑ sult of a choice on our part, for example, relationships based on age, family background, sex, race, and ethnic‑ ity. Others are ‘achieved,’ that is, chosen in light of our abilites and the contingencies of our situation: occupa‑ tion, for instance, is one; marriage (in the West today) is another; friendship another still.” –A. Nehamas2 Narrowly construed, cultural identity is a causal agen‑ cy that “permits the self­‑conscious evaluation of hu‑ man possibilities in the light of a system of [cultural] values that reflect prevailing ideas about what human life ought to be.” –Jaegwon Kim3

Many thoughtful persons today are raising difficult questions once again about “identity.” But, why such questions now, and why are they “difficult”? And just what are the main questions, and how might they be, if not answered, at least rearticulated in more explicit terms? The following reflections must be rather elementary.4 Nonetheless, I hope that some of these necessarily brief remarks may prove helpful for further, more thoughtful and sustained inquiry into the nature of our various identities in these more than merely modernist times.

157

Essay VIII

Cultural and Religious Questions Now? Such renewed interrogations today are not surprising. For just after the blood‑ iest of all previous centuries ended, the new century began, spectacularly, with the gratuitous murders on real­‑time television of three thousand persons in the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre. The perpetrators thought of themselves as bound by both cultural and religious identity to murder in‑ nocent people. Some of their victims even shared these identities with their murderers. Not long afterwards, the war in Afghanistan, the second Intifada in the Middle East, and the second invasion of Iraq provided still more terrible in‑ stances of appeals to cultural and religious identities as supposed justifications for the murders of innocent people. Confronted almost continuously with such horrendous matters, some thoughtful persons, unsurprisingly, began asking just what sense and significance talk of “identity” could properly have?

Why Talk of Identity Today is Difficult Several good reasons could be adduced. But at least one basic reason for such difficulty today is the recurring failure of otherwise knowledgeable persons to disambiguate different ways of talking about identity. For we know but sometimes forget that reflective persons may use the word “identity” to refer to a number of quite distinct matters. Here are several useful reminders. Thus, for brevity’s sake restricting ourselves here to English parlance to‑ day only, one may properly use the word “identity” mainly to refer either to a fact or to a close similarity. That is, “identity” may refer to “a fact of being who or what a person or thing is” (“She knows the identity of the bomber”), or to “a close similarity or affinity” between things or persons (“Although not the same, there is an identity between Hebrew and Arabic”).5 Focussing on the first main sense here, the fact of identity, proves help‑ ful. For we may then distinguish a nominal sub­‑sense, what determines the fact of identity, from an adjectival sub­‑sense, what modifies the fact of identi‑ ty. Thus, we may distinguish nominally “the characteristics determining [“to determine” here means “to identify”] who or what a person or thing is” (“She wanted to understand his distinctive Israeli identity”), from what determines who someone or what something is “by bearing their name and often other details . . .”(“She examined his identity card”).

158



Cultural and Religious Identities

This, the modifying sub­‑sense of “identity” as a hard fact and not as just a close similarity helps us understand better what many people mean when they speak, for example, of “identity politics” as “the tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad­‑based party politics.”6 Unsurprising questions today, then, about such matters as identity poli‑ tics and, we may add, cultural identity and religious identity are often difficult at least because of unresolved and recurring verbal ambiguities.

Disambiguating Talk of Identity When talk of “identity” is suitably disambiguated, what then are the main questions about such matters as cultural identity and religious identity? Once again, a number of candidate questions come to mind. They arise when we reflect not just on everyday informed discussion of such matters, but on more particular issues arising from the different senses of the phrases “cultural identity” and “religious identity.” We may take the first expression here more narrowly than in the usual broad senses of historical, sociological, and anthropological studies of “cul‑ tural identity” that refer mainly to those general aspects of the modifying facts of identity that are “characteristics of a particular form of life.” Let us say then that “cultural identity” here refers more narrowly to those hierarchies of values that contribute to give sense and significance to those characteristic forms of life. Cultural identity on this narrow account is a causal agency that “permits the self­‑conscious evaluation of human possibilities in the light of a system of [cultural] values that reflect prevailing ideas about what human life ought to be.”7 Similarly, when reflecting on “religious identity” here, we may take this second expression more narrowly than in the usual broad senses of the reli‑ gious identity of a person or a community deriving from central beliefs based upon both religious faith in revealed truths and human reason. Let us say then that “religious identity” here refers more narrowly to the fact of a person’s or a community’s identity deriving from central beliefs based upon natural reason alone.8 Again, “religious identity” understood in this narrow sense is also a caus‑ al agency permitting “the self­‑conscious evaluation of human possibilities in

159

Essay VIII

the light of a system of [religious] values that reflect prevailing ideas about what human life ought to be.”9 With these reminders on hand, we now recognize that several of the main questions concerning cultural and religious identities today arise not just from recurring ambiguities in our uses of these expressions. Questions also arise from the conceptual tensions between such identities when we make them more explicit. Now, on reflection, I believe that among several main questions here are two in particular. The first question might initially go: Do individual persons have one or many basic identities, whether cultural or religious? And the sec‑ ond might go: Must persons sometimes establish the priority of one or several identities, whether cultural or religious?

Reformulating the Questions But how are we, if not to answer such questions, at least to reformulate them in such a way that they might more easily find their appropriate responses? Several further distinctions prove useful. For to rearticulate even these two questions we need to distinguish between not just cultural and religious identities; we must also distinguish between singular and plural identities, personal and communal identities, and between first­‑person and third­‑person identities. If we think mainly of cultural identities in the regimented senses that we have specified so far, then we can easily recognize that, at least cultur‑ ally, persons belong mainly to more than one group. Thus, you may be of English origins, a British citizen, an Anglican practitioner, a member of the Labour Party, a maritime lawyer, a regular weekend hockey team player, and so on. You are not just mainly “English.” You have more than one main cultural identity. Your cultural identity is plural. Correlatively, it is false for anyone to hold that you are just “a Brit,” and thereby to reduce your plural identities to something strictly singular.10 A second distinction now comes into view. For if our cultural identities are ever more than just strictly singular, then we still need to distinguish be‑ tween our identities as individual persons belonging to multiple groups and our identities as individual persons tout court. Some of our cultural identities, that is, are clearly less central to us strictly as individuals than they are to us as members of our respective societies. That is, we sometimes have to rank our cultural identities in terms of our various allegiances both to ourselves and to others. Someone might want

160



Cultural and Religious Identities

to claim, for example, that as a citizen of Great Britain she is legally subject to military conscription, but, rejecting Ulster Unionism on strictly political grounds, she no longer can recognize that legal claim as binding. Here we find the claim that a person’s individual cultural identity may take precedence over her social identity, her legally being subject to the laws of England.11 And, for now, a last distinction arises just here. For especially with re‑ gard to religious identity we often realize that, in trying to explain our value choices rationally to others and to ourselves, we tell different stories about our own strictly individual religious identities. Thus, we may sometimes talk about ourselves to others as being the kind of person (as having the identity of someone) who repeatedly chooses not to act in certain kinds of religiously unsatisfactory but strictly legal ways. (“That’s just not me,” we say some‑ times.) And yet, at other times, we discover some of our inner monologues to be very much taking place in first­‑person terms only. (“Continuing to act up in that way is just not continuing to be you any more.”) Call the first kind of stories about personal identity “third­‑person stories” and the second kind “first­‑person stories.”12 Now, however plural one’s cultural identities remain, unlike third­‑person stories about religious identity, first­‑person stories here may sometimes require rationally establishing a unique religious identity. Return now to our initial formulations of two main questions about cul‑ tural and religious identities: “Do individual persons have one or many basic identities?” and “Must persons sometimes establish the priority of one or sev‑ eral identities?” In view of the previous distinctions perhaps we may now reformulate our first question along some such lines as these. “Among the plural identities that persons exhibit when considered both as members of different cultures within society and as strict individuals, in what senses, if any, may any one of these plural cultural identities be properly called “basic?” And perhaps we may also reformulate our second question similarly. In order reasonably to make certain basic life choices, must religious persons es‑ tablish a unique personal religious identity so as rationally to articulate a prop‑ erly ordered hierarchy of values that makes possible a suitably self­‑critical assessment of what an authentic human life ought to be?

161

Essay VIII

Envoi: Fresh Questions? On the bases of even such brief, elementary reflections as these, many fresh questions today about identities both cultural and religious often yield prom‑ ising reformulations when due attention is paid to basic ambiguities and dis‑ tinctions.

162



Cultural and Religious Identities

Endnotes 1

This short essay is a revised version of an invited paper first presented at UNESCO in 2007.

2

A. Nehamas, On Friendship (NY: Basic Books, 2016), pp. 54–55.

3

J. Kim, “Culture,” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

4

For a recent and comprehensive standard philosophical account of identity see H. Noonan and B. Curtis, “Identity,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/identity/.

5

See the Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2003).

6

Ibid.

7

J. Kim, “Culture,” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

8

Cf. W. J. Wainwright, “Natural Religion,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. R. Audi, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).

9

J. Kim, “Culture,” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

10

On “the illusions of a unique identity” see especially A. Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, (London: Allen Lane, 2006), notably pp. 32–36, 132–148.

11

See, among others, M. Miegel, Epochenwende: Gewinnt der Westen die Zukunft (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2005), especially pp. 229–237. I thank H. Dessloch for this reference.

12

Some of the scientific and philosophical complexities here come clear in the multi­ ‑disciplinary contributions to the joint meeting of the French “Académie des Sci‑ ences” and the “Académie des Sciences morales et politiques,” June 23–24, 2005, pub‑ lished as L’identité? Soi et non­‑soi, individu et personne, ed. E. D. Carosella et al. (Paris: PUF, 2006), especially pp. 69–91 and 101–110.

163

164

Essay IX: Personal Sovereignties1 A person is “an ontologically independent entity that bears properties, stands in relation to other substances, persists through time … undergoes qualitative change over time … [and] possesses [as dispositions] causal powers and liabilities.” –E. J. Lowe2 A person “can properly be understood only as a ‘we’ that is neither a simple intersubjectivity nor a dialogue between autonomous subjects.” –E. J. Lowe3

The backgrounds of modernity’s various histories, epistemologies, and value theories show that politics and ethics are closely linked in many ways. One link is the central but still contentious notion in both of the person. Take the case of the European Union today. Many reflective persons con‑ tinue to puzzle over the EU as a political aggregate of different polities, soci‑ eties, and individuals. They do so because there is an EU paradox, a rational inconsistency. The paradox is that the EU, despite its extraordinary resourcefulness, re‑ mains chronically unable to harmonize its economic and financial structures, its energy policies, its food and water resources, its health systems, its defence needs, and its immigration policies. Most strikingly, the EU remains unable to agree on how to assist, substantially, so many desperate persons in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere. Most basically, member states disagree on what and who persons are.This EU paradox may be resolved when political debates about sovereignty’s limits expand to include ethical discussions of basic ethical matters like the surprisingly still elusive nature of persons. Accordingly, the aim here is to point in the direction of an account of persons that will support proper understandings of those ethical and not just

165

Essay XI

political values that the Preamble of any eventual European Union constitu‑ tion will need to entrench tomorrow.

Realists and Legalists Part of the EU’s current indecisiveness about, for example, defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity derives from a continuing impasse at the UN Security Council. The impasse is mainly over whether external intervention is justifiable for defending human rights in Syria. This indecisiveness, whether in the UN or in the EU, derives largely but not exclusively from the differences between Russia’s and China’s present understandings of international state sovereignty and that of the three other permanent Security Council members, the US, France, and the UK.4 The question as to what kind of political sovereignty in particular (quasi­ ‑absolute or relative) is to be counted among the basic values of the UN and the EU is fundamental. But even more fundamental is the further question as to what basic type of sovereignty in general (whether exclusively political or social and individual) is primary, and what basic political and ethical values an eventual EU constitution (written or unwritten) should include. If future deliberations conclude that some basic type of sovereignty should be included in any EU constitution, then should that sovereignty be some form of political sovereignty only? On the bases of some recent investigations,5 the answer must be nega‑ tive. For exclusively political sovereignty as quasi­‑absolute state sovereignty would leave the EU member states at the mercy of still unresolved basic dis‑ agreements,6 for example about how human rights are to be understood and safeguarded. Such disagreements include notably disputes between “realists” in the ancient traditions of Thucydides and Machiavelli and “legalists” in the contemporary traditions of Rawls and Habermas. In international relations7 today so­‑called “realists” take political sover‑ eignty as pre­‑eminently a property of states rather than a property either of societies or of individuals.8 And because states are subject to certain supra­ ‑national necessities, they are taken to be exempt from the many moral con‑ straints affecting societies and persons. Modern nation states are understood as having “to defend the interests of their own people without regard to the rights of anyone else.”9 On this first view, then, political sovereignty is neither moral nor immoral; rather, political sovereignty appears to be simply amoral. By contrast, so­‑called “legalists” understand states as similar enough to societies so as to be governed by sets of rules deriving from customs, con‑

166



Personal Sovereignties

ventions, and treaties. And because of such strong similarities and, further, because of deep connections between law and morality, states are not exempt from moral constraints. Thus, on this second view, political sovereignty is neither amoral nor immoral; rather, political sovereignty appears to be moral through and through.10 Despite much informed discussion, however, wide consensus on which of these two traditional and powerful positions is warranted, if either, has yet to emerge in international relations. Experience suggests that entrenching in any newly drafted EU constitution a political understanding of sovereignty, either in exclusively realist or in exclusively legalist terms, would probably preclude reaching effective consensus among EU member states and their re‑ spective citizens for its ratification. Accordingly, a second question now arises. Should the sovereignty to be included in a new EU constitution be neither exclusively any form of political sovereignty whether realist or legalist or otherwise but at once both a political and what we might call broadly a social sovereignty?11 Again, the answer to this second question must also be negative. And that for two main reasons. First, the moralization of the notion of political sovereignty in inter‑ national relations today remains strongly controversial. Such continuing moralization is one major factor that still precludes achieving the requisite citizen consensus for ratifying and thereby legitimating an EU constitution that would entrench such an understanding of sovereignty and its underlying political and ethical values. But the situation is scarcely better concerning the moralization of social sovereignty either. For much discussion persists among political scientists, sociologists, political theorists, and philosophers concerning a key issue here. That issue is whether, unlike states, societies are in any strong sense properly understood as necessarily constrained by moral realities.12 Just as many informed scholars argue that states cannot be genuine subjects of moral properties, so too almost as many argue that societies cannot be such subjects either. Consequently, trying to weaken the claim that states are intrinsically amoral by arguing in one way or another that, since states are inseparable from societies and that since societies are intrinsically moral realities, states must be in some sense moral entities, just won’t do. That states necessarily include some moral entities does not make states themselves necessarily moral. Thus, enlarging the notion of sovereignty so as to include both political and social sovereignty at once cannot increase the probabilities of providing strong enough argumentative bases for winning required consensus for even‑

167

Essay XI



tual ratification. Still, the idea of enlarging any exclusively political notion of sovereignty to figure in the preamble of an eventual new draft EU constitu‑ tion merits some further attention. What about the idea then of enlarging the notion of sovereignty so as to include political, social, and now some notions of individual sovereignty as well?13 This idea is promising for two main reasons. First, since the rejection of the draft EU constitution in 2005 and in fact from the time of the acceptance of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2000, preambles to EU treaties have rightly put much emphasis on the individual as one of the basic European values.14 Thus, as the new paragraph added to later preambles after the rejection of the draft EU constitution indicates, it is the individual who incorporates just those universal values already enshrined in the EU’s cultural, religious, and humanistic heritages. Hence, construing a notion of sovereignty broadly in some individual as well as in some political and social senses to be added to the preamble to a new EU constitution would already be continuous and consistent with recent past EU practice. Enlarging the sense of sovereignty with reference especially to the individual then would be a constructive and not a divisive move with re‑ spect to reaching eventual consensus on such a foundational document. And, second, putting explicit emphasis on the role of the individual in any satisfactory conception of an understanding of individual sovereignty to be entrenched in the preamble to a new EU constitution would be a very large step towards achieving an important objective. That widely shared objective is overcoming the largely public, although not majority, philosophical accep‑ tance of a weakly argued moral relativism. This widely assumed yet insuffi‑ ciently reflective moral relativism continues to afflict not just some minority philosophical reflection today; it troubles both current political and social majority understandings of sovereignty. We need to grant of course that the links between states, societies, indi‑ viduals and intrinsic, objective moral properties remain contentious matters.15 Still, such links especially between individuals taken specifically as persons and intrinsic, objective moral properties, are (while subject to ongoing phil‑ osophical discussion) much less controversial. In fact, as the philosophical journals continue to show, such very strong connections between individuals as persons, morality, and ethical values are, and have been for most of the pe‑ riod of modern philosophy, the majority and argued view of most informed, reflective observers.16

168



Personal Sovereignties

Thus, further enlarging the notion of sovereignty so as to include not just political and social understandings of sovereignty but also individual personal ones, I think, can indeed increase the probabilities of winning the required consensus for eventual ratification of such a preamble to a new EU constitu‑ tion. Such enlargement however needs to include the results of further philo‑ sophical reflection on persons and values. It seems then that reflection needs to proceed from considerations of po‑ litical sovereignties through those of social sovereignties to those of individ‑ ual personal sovereignties. For this way of proceeding guarantees us a higher probability of reaching consensus. What requires closer attention however is just what kind of an account of the person in these contexts seems most fruitful.

What Persons Are Begin with the main differences between what some philosophers call physi‑ calist and non­‑physicalist conceptions of the person. The distinction turns on whether some predicates – say, being 1.5 meters tall – apply both to persons and to material things, or whether other predicates – say, being self­‑conscious – apply to persons only. The first are often called material, or M­‑predicates, whereas the second are called personal, or P­‑predicates. Thus, M­‑predicates apply both to material bodies and to persons, whereas P­‑predicates apply to persons only. In this sense, P­‑predicates are not “reducible”17 to M­‑predicates. Accordingly, P­‑pred‑ icates are said in this sense to be “primitive.”18 When we choose, however, to set up the discussion of persons in terms of predicates categorized this way rather than in some one of various other cogent ways on view in contemporary philosophical debate,19 we need further specifications. Suppose then we simplify and turn to one distinguished ac‑ count only of both kinds of predicates.20 On this account, the claim that P­‑predicates are primitive opens out onto a larger account of persons in terms of what is usually called “substance dual‑ ism.”21 For persons exhibit characteristics of both physical and psychological substance. More specifically, one might hold that a person is a distinctive kind of substance distinguishable by its characteristic existence and identity condi‑ tions, including their persistence.22 Persons are simple psychological sub‑

169

Essay XI

stances that are inseparable yet fully distinct from the physical substances in which they are incorporated. Importantly, as a substance a person is an individual. That is, a person is “an ontologically independent entity that bears properties, stands in relation to other substances, persists through time … undergoes qualitative change over time … [and] possesses [as dispositions] causal powers and liabilities.”23 Moreover, as specifically individual psychological substances, persons are “conscious, thinking beings … possessed of distinctive and irreducible psychological powers, including the central powers of perception, thought, reason, and will.”24 Now, as psychological substances persons are not essentially biological beings, for essentially biological beings are physical entities.25 More explicitly, persons are not essentially animals. That is, persons are not essentially human animals persisting through only those stages of their existence in which one is conscious26 and capable of thinking, reasoning, reflecting on oneself, and not through others where one is not self­‑reflexively conscious, such as infancy, severe mental disability, extreme senility, and so on. But exactly why are persons not essentially human animals? They are not because the properties of essentially biological animals do not exhibit the characteristic existence and identity conditions of persons including their per‑ sistence. That is, essentially “biological substances … do not possess identi‑ ty conditions suitable for the attribution to them of [certain] psychological powers.”27 But if not human animals, persons as distinctive psychological substances are not essentially immaterial entities either. Why? They are not because, un‑ like immaterial entities, persons have mass and occupy both spatial and tem‑ poral dimensions. Nor is a person as a distinctive psychological substance constituted by the physical substance that is their body. Why? Because a person is not a com‑ plex substance but a simple substance. Nor are persons as distinctive psychological substances mere collections of psychological properties occurring in the physical substance that is the body. Why? Because persons as distinctive psychological substances are more than just aggregates of such properties; persons are holistic entities that are more than the sum of their parts. Persons then may be plausibly understood as simple psychological sub‑ stances, distinct from but not reducible to the physical substances of their bodies. That is, persons are entities that exhibit distinctive existence, identity,

170



Personal Sovereignties

and persistence conditions. Their essential properties are primitive and irre‑ ducible to their material properties. In short, persons are pre­‑eminently psychological substances in the sens‑ es that they bear properties, persist through change, and exercise genuine causal powers. So much then for one prominent current understanding of the person. And here now is another.

Who Persons Are Understanding persons necessarily involves not just understanding the ques‑ tion “what is the person?” Understanding persons appears also to involve at least two further questions – “who is the person?” and “how do persons ex‑ ist?” These questions of course are in the domain of a certain kind metaphys‑ ics.28 Such a metaphysics sees its general task as the elucidation of the person neither exclusively as a rational animal nor exclusively as the resultant of cer‑ tain causal forces. Rather, the metaphysical task is to elucidate the person as pre­‑eminently an entity whose unique ways of existing in the world comprise actions defined by a freedom prior to and basic for any political, social, or ethical activity.29 More particularly, this kind of metaphysics does not attempt to formu‑ late any new definition of the person that might displace the historically cen‑ tral definitions of either a Boethius or of a Kant.30 Rather, intuitively such a metaphysics focuses mainly on two objects of philosophical investigation.31 The first is the person’s “principle of individuation in his ways of under‑ standing himself and his relations with the world.” Here, this kind of meta‑ physics focuses its investigations on a major supposition. The major suppo‑ sition is that the principle of individuation32 for a person may be properly grasped by means of reflection on what it is in the events of the world,33 the encounters with other persons, and the transcendence of the divine that in‑ eluctably summons the person to question himself. And the second object of this kind of metaphysical inquiry is the person as a social entity. This so­‑called “social sense” of the person is the idea that a person “can properly be understood only as a ‘we’ that is neither a simple intersubjectivity nor a dialogue between autonomous subjects.”34 Here, in focussing on the social sense of the person, inquiry focuses on something very different from any sense of the person as an all powerful, ab‑ solutely individual subject who is its own creator.35 That is, inquiry focuses on

171

Essay XI

the persons as a plural “we” that is prior to any social, political, or individual “I.” Such a “we” is even prior to any moral dimension.36 In short, on such a view a not improper understanding of the nature of the person is founded neither on natural scientific nor on social scientific in‑ quiry exclusively but also on philosophical reflection. On its own terms this metaphysical account of the person may not unfairly be described as turning finally on a series of what we might roughly call here summary basic intu‑ itions.37 One of these basic intuitions is that the person is pre­‑eminently not “a pure self­‑presence to itself of the reflective subject, but … the response to a summons.” Another basic intuition is that the person is “a conscious indi‑ vidual who cannot unify himself solely by his own powers…” And still anoth‑ er is that the unity of the person, “always in movement and always in a situa‑ tion of departure, is inseparable from the [co­‑ordinate] task of rendering its proper unity [not just to itself but] to the world itself.”38 Of course, summary basic intuitions like these are not uncontroversial. Perhaps this is an understatement. Still, once worked out in philosophical ar‑ gument, these intuitions make it possible, such an account continues, to un‑ derstand the person neither as a universal entity nor as a singular entity but as an entity “that individualises itself in universalizing itself and does so by its own free actions.”39 So much then for a second rather different account of the person.

Persons as Essentially Sovereign With these contrasting current accounts of the person freshly in mind, and in light of our concerns here with links between the political and the ethical against the backgrounds of modernity, one question now arises as to what are the major ways in which a person may properly be said to be essentially sover‑ eign? I think we may be able to agree reasonably on at least three such ways. First, a person as an individual psychological substance is essentially sov‑ ereign in that some of his or her decisions may arise from a person’s will.40 Here, the will is to be understood precisely as a power of the person tout court and not just exclusively of the person’s body. Further, some of these decisions may arise not just completely or in exclusively “rational” ways. That is, some such reasonable decisions may be understood as coming about, as it were, “spontaneously.” And finally we may call the will a spontaneous power in which the person as a whole makes at last some important decisions “spon‑

172



Personal Sovereignties

taneously” in the sense that these decisions are not characteristically brought about by prior causes.41 To clarify, consider a simple example. Take the case of a radium atom’s power to undergo radioactive decay.42 An atom of radium decays by the emis‑ sion of radiation. Radiation is “energy travelling in the form of electromag‑ netic waves or photons.”43 Now, radium’s radioactive decay may properly be said to be “rational” in the sense that, given the structure and properties of the radium atom, ra‑ diation emission flows from such an individual substance naturally. But while rational, the radiation emission may also properly be said to be “spontaneous” in the sense of “spontaneous emission.” In spontaneous emission there is no prior substance or event that explains it; that is, there are neither any prior be‑ liefs nor desires nor reasons of the radium atom, which of course has none.44 In similar but not identical ways one may argue analogously, that, just as the radium atom exercises a spontaneous power, the will is also able to exer‑ cise a spontaneous power.45 Note however among the usual differences in any analogy a crucial one here. When the radium atom decays, “it does so without any cause [in the sense that no individual substance acts upon the radium atom with causal influence] and … for no reason at all,” one metaphysician writes. “The difference with the will is just that, although its exercise has no cause, it is characteristically exercised for a reason, which the person in question is aware of and normally is able to articulate.”46 Perhaps we may call this first kind of essentially personal sovereignty “spontaneous personal sovereignty.” A second way in which a person as an individual psychological substance is essentially sovereign is that sometimes such a person may choose to do otherwise.47 To see this second point return for a moment to the example of the ra‑ dium atom. This example is especially important because it shows that some spontaneous powers exist in nature. One consequence is that at least some physical events do not result from the sufficient causation of some prior phys‑ ical events. Further, this empirical fact means that the frequent scientistic claim that the world is “causally closed” in the very strong sense that all physical events without exception are necessarily the results of prior sufficient causes is not correct.48 Possibilities for at least some understandings of free will thus remain very much open.49 Another way then in which persons may properly be said to be essen‑ tially sovereign is in terms of their free will. Some persons, we may say more

173

Essay XI

carefully,50 are essentially sovereign in the specific sense that they sometimes may choose to do otherwise than they actually do choose. This is not the idea of essential personal sovereignty as spontaneity. Rather, the idea here includes the additional notion of essential personal sovereignty as the power of free choice. There is, I think, still a third way in which we may not improperly speak of an essential personal sovereignty since we may also speak of essential per‑ sonal sovereignty as necessarily limited. For unlike, say, an individual number, a person as an individual psychological substance is a contingent entity. Per‑ sons come and go. But what persons lack is not just necessity; persons also lack permanence. Persons essentially lack ontological independence. Accordingly, although persons are essentially sovereign in several ways, the essential sovereignty a person has is always a contingent and never a nec‑ essary personal sovereignty. This means that personal sovereignty itself is nec‑ essarily limited in the senses that personal sovereignty is, while essential, both unnecessary and impermanent.

Envoi: Contingencies May I conclude then and perhaps help to re­‑open these controversial matters for renewed critical discussion by simply restating my initial question? That question went: Can the EU paradox be resolved by expanding informed dis‑ cussion so as to make possible political and ethical consensus about the lim‑ ited nature of persons and not just about the limited nature of sovereignty? On at least some of the considerations considered here, I think the answer can be “Yes.”

174



Personal Sovereignties

Endnotes 1

This paper is a revised version of an invited paper first presented at the XXXIII International Symposium on Eco­‑Ethics on the theme “Ethics and Politics” held in Paris at the Collège de France from September 29 to October 4, 2014. The paper was first published in Eco­‑ethica, 4 (2015), 93–106.

2

E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 165.

3

E. Housset, « La personne en actes, » Etudes, 417/4 (Octobre) 2012, p. 5, with modifications.

4

The word “sovereignty” refers today primarily to a kind of supremacy, “the su‑ preme controlling power in a community … absolute and independent authority of a state” (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols., 6th ed. [Oxford: OUP, 2007], hereafter “SOED”). D. Philpott, “Sovereignty,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, 2011, URL = , includes an extensive bibliography. Besides a general discussion of different kinds of sovereignty R. Jackson, The Evolution of an Idea (London: Polity, 2007) and D. Philpott, “Sovereignty,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, 2011, URL = , also provide brief historical accounts. Note that the expression “sovereignty” is mainly used in connection with political matters. “Political sovereignty” may be taken here as denoting the quasi­‑absolute authority of a modern nation state such as those currently making up the EU.

5

See for example my article, “Limited Sovereignties?” in Eco­‑Ethica 3 (2014), pp. 119–130. See also the related discussions in P. McCormick, Reward’s Restraint: Limited Sovereignties, Ancient Values, and the Preamble for a European Constitution (Olomouc, Czech Republic: University of Olomouc Press, 2014).

6

See for example H. Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin, 2014) who analyses the basic problem of “how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historic perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideo‑ logical extremism … there is no consensus among the major actors about the rules and limits guiding this process, or its ultimate destination. The result is mounting tension.”

7

Cf. R. Jackson and G. Sorensen, Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches, 5th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

8

For the somewhat different uses of these terms in legal philosophy see for example R. Wacks, Philosophy of Law (Oxford: OUP, 2014), esp. pp. 108–114. In general,

175

Essay XI

see the magisterial work of M. Delmas­‑Marty, Vers une communauté de valeurs: les forces imaginaires de droit, 4 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 2004–2011). 9

M. Walzer, “International Relations,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2005), p. 440. Cf. T. Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton: PUP, 1983).

10

See R. Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard UP, 2011), pp. 333–334.

11

The expression “social sovereignty” may be understood here as a social group’s exaggerated claims to cultural self­‑sufficiency. A current example of such an un­ ‑circumscribed autarchy might be the claims to social self­‑sufficiency of highly educated and culturally privileged elite social groups in India and Pakistan.

12

Whether the rule of law take precedence over issues of human rights, for example, or whether human rights have priority over the rule of law remains deeply con‑ troversial for many sociologists. Cf. the French sociologist Alain Touraine’s views that «les droits sont au­‑dessus des lois» (A. Touraine, La fin des sociétés [Paris: Seuil, 2013]). See also Bled et al. 2013.

13

“Individual sovereignty” may be understood here as denoting a person’s having pre­‑eminent anthropological and not just political self­‑autonomy with respect to any other person that exists in the same particular society.

14

“Preamble. A preliminary statement … introductory paragraph, section, or clause … in a statute, deed, or other formal document, setting forth its grounds and inten‑ tion” (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary [hereafter cited as “SOED 2007]”). The SOED describes another pertinent sense of this key expression: “preamble” as “a preceding fact or circumstance; esp. a presage, a prognostic.”

15

On the key notion here of objectivity see for example S. Gaukroger, Objectivity (Oxford: OUP, 2012), T. Burge, Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: OUP, 2010), and the papers in Re­‑Thinking Objectivity, ed. A. McGill (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1994).

16

Cf. D. Parfit, On What Matters, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2011), esp. pp. 404–419, Scanlon 2014, esp. pp. 117–119, and in general recent articles on the history of ethics in the modern period in The Oxford Handbook on the History of Ethics, ed. R. Crisp (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

17

See J. Kim, “Emergent Properties,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2005), p. 794.

18

The debate in this form derives from P. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959).

176



Personal Sovereignties

19

See for example the various positions in Persons Human and Divine, ed. P. van Inwagen and D. Zimmerman (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).

20

Here, I rely mainly on the comprehensive account of E. J. Lowe, Personal Agen‑ cy: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford: OUP, 2008), esp. pp. 165–171. For an important sympathetic but recent critical view of Lowe’s not­‑exclusively scientific naturalistic account of the ontology of the person see A. Carruth and S. Gibb, “The Ontology of E. J. Lowe’s Substance Dualism,” in Ontology, Mo‑ dality, and Mind: Themes from the Metaphysics of E. J. Lowe, ed. A. Carruth and S. Gibb (Oxford: OUP, 2018), pp. 149–164. See however my critical account of several other current views in P. McCormick, “Persons as Subjects of Suffering,” in Ethical Personalism, ed. C. M. Gueye (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2011), pp. 205–240, and the discussions in my book, Relationals: On the Nature and Ground of Persons (forthcoming).

21

For a recent discussion and application of substance dualism see R. Swinburne, Mind, Brain, and Free Will (Oxford: OUP, 2013). Cf. however the distinctions between substance dualisms and property dualisms in D. Zimmerman, “Three In‑ troductory Questions,” in Persons Human and Divine, ed. P. van Inwagen and D. Zimmerman (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), pp. 15–20.

22

For the details of this ontology see E. J. Lowe, The Four­‑Category Ontology (Ox‑ ford: OUP, 2006), esp. pp. 20–33.

23

Ibid., p. 165.

24

Ibid., p. 171.

25

For recent reflections on the central philosophical issues here see for example P. Godfrey­‑Smith, Philosophy of Biology (Princeton: PUP, 2014), esp. pp. 120–143.

26

Cf. J. J. Prinz, The Conscious Brain (Oxford: OUP, 2012) and T. Bayne, The Unity of Consciousness (Oxford: OUP, 2012).

27

E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 169.

28

Among the key texts here are the phenomenological works of Scheler, especially M. Scheler, Man’s Place in the Cosmos, tr. K. S. Frings (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008) and M. Scheler, The Constitution of the Human Being, tr. J. Cutting (Mil‑ waukee: Marquette UP, 2008), together with those of Husserl, especially E. Hus‑ serl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, tr. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970) and E. Husserl, Natur und Geist, ed. M. Weiler (The Hague: Nijhof, 2001).

29

Cf. E. Housset, « La personne en actes, » Etudes, 417/4 (Octobre), 2012, ms., pp. 1–3. Hereafter, page references to E. Housset, « La personne en actes, » Etudes,

177

Essay XI

417/4 (Octobre), 2012, are to this manuscript copy. Note that I cite Housset work in my own translations while a few times modifying the sense of his views so as to strengthen them. 30

On the history of the concept of the person see E. Housset, La vocation de la personne: L’histoire du concept de personne (Paris: PUF, 2007) and cf. E. Housset, L’intériorité d’exil : le soi ou risque de altérité (Paris : Cerf, 2008).

31

Contrast this approach with another kind of metaphysics, on view for example in K. Fine, Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (Oxford: OUP, 2005) and ‑Blackwell, 2007) that applies K. Fine, Semantic Relationalism (Oxford: Wiley­ methods from mathematical logic to clarify concepts and to solve metaphysical problems.

32

Standardly, the principle of individuation of something, often called its principle of identity, is “the principle associated with a kind of thing, telling when we have two of them and when we have one … [and also the principle answering the] need to know when two appearances or stages can rightly be regarded as appearances or stages of just one thing of the kind” (S. Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philoso‑ phy, 2nd ed. [Oxford: OUP, 2005], p. 184).

33

These events include, notably, the person’s life­‑long exposure to the events of ill‑ nesses and to the concomitant events of medical interventions. Cf. for examples the essays of A. Fagot­‑Largeault, Médicine et philosophie (Paris: PUF, 2010).

34

E. Housset, « La personne en actes, » Etudes, 417/4 (Octobre), 2012, p. 5, with modifications.

35

Historically, this understanding is said to go back to Duns Scotus’s voluntaristic understanding of the subject as an entity prescribing for itself both its own pur‑ poses and its own laws. Cf. M. J. Inwood, “Duns Scotus,” in Honderich 2005, pp. 222–223, and the pertinent articles in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. T. Williams (Cambridge: CUP, 2003 which gives a bibliography.

36

Cf. Ibid., with modifications.

37

Besides the work of E. Housset, similar basic intuitions are also on exhibit in the phenomenological metaphysics of J. Chrétien (see for example J. Chrétien, Répon‑ dre (Paris: PUF, 2007) and J.­‑L. Marion (see J.­‑L. Marion, Etant donné [Paris: PUF, 2007]).

38

Ibid., pp. 6–7.

39

Ibid., pp. 5–6.

40

For the key notions here see B. O’Shaughnessy, The Will: A Dual­‑Aspect Theo‑ ry, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), passim. O’Shaughnessy also includes a useful

178



Personal Sovereignties

glossary of technical terms for understanding better some of the complexities in speaking today of the will. For the empirical backgrounds see for example M. Jean‑ nerod, Le cerveau volontaire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009), esp. pp. 244–261. See also J. Hyman, Action, Knowledge, and Will (Oxford: OUP, 2015), esp. 211–221. 41

Ibid., p. 176. To preserve philosophical continuity I continue to follow here E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford: OUP, 2008).

42

This is Lowe’s instructive example of “spontaneous powers” in the inanimate world.

43

The Oxford Dictionary of Science, ed. J. Daintith and E. Martin, 6th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2010), s. v.

44

“The emission of a photon by an atom as it makes a transition from an excited state to the ground state … The process of spontaneous emission, which cannot be described by non­‑relativistic quantum mechanics as given by formulations such as the Schrödinger equation [i.e. “an equation … for the wave function of a particle”], is responsible for the limited lifetime of an excited state of an atom before it emits a photon” (Ibid). For detailed discussions of radioactivity cf. Chelet 2006 and on natural radioactivity see P. Ravanyi and M. Borry, La radioactivité artificielle et son histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1984), esp. pp. 173–205.

45

Cf. E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 150, 155–156, 176–178.

46

Ibid., p. 177. On the key point here about reasons see B. Saint­‑Sernin, Le ratio‑ nalisme qui vient (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), esp. pp. 239–246 and T. Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford: OUP, 2014), esp. pp. 30–38.

47

The capacity “to do otherwise” remains a much debated topic in the contempo‑ rary metaphysics of free will. See for example Fischer in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. R. H. Kane, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2011), pp. 243–265, and related articles.

48

Cf. T. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (New York: OUP, 2012), esp. pp. 112–16.

49

B. Pesaran et al., “Free Choice Activates a Decision Circuit Between Frontal and Parietal Cortex,” Nature 453 (May 15), 2008, pp. 406–409.

50

“More carefully” because much current philosophical reflection continues criti‑ cally to refine such talk. See for example the three papers on so­‑called “Frankfurt­ ‑Style Examples” in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. R. H. Kane (Oxford: OUP, 2002), pp. 281–334, and the revisions and additions in The Oxford Hand‑ book of Free Will, ed. R. H. Kane, 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

179

180

Peter McCormick, Book Publications • Relationals: On the Nature and Grounds of Persons (May 2019, submitted to a university press). • Aspects Darkly Yellowing: Ethics, Intuitions, and the Modernist Poetry of Suffering and Passage. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 and Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2010. • Restraint’s Rewards: Limited Sovereignties, Ancient Values, and the Pre‑ amble for a European Constitution. Olomouc: Palacky University Press, 2014. • Moments of Mutuality: Re-Articulating Social Justice in the EU Today. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 and Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2012. • Poverty Among Immigrant Children in Europe, with A. Bhalla. London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2009. • Eco-Ethics and Contemporary Philosophical Reflection: The Technological Conjuncture and Modern Rationality. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2008. • Eco-Ethics and An Ethics of Suffering: Ethical Innovation and the Situation of the Destitute. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2008. • Ethics and the Deep Pathos of Things: Famines, Philosophies, and Philo‑ sophical Ethics. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2003. • The Negative Sublime: Ethics at the Dark Borders of Reason. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2003. • Modernity, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. • Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell Univer‑ sity Press, 1988. • Heidegger and the Language of the World: An Argumentative Reading of the Later Heidegger on Language. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1976.

173

Selected Essays • The Spirit That We Sought: Essays in Ethics and Poetics (April 2019, sub‑ mitted to a university press). • Modernities: Histories, Beliefs, and Values. Nordhausen: Bausch Verlag, 2019, in press. • Solicitations: Poverties, Discourses, and Limits. Nordhausen: Bausch Ver‑ lag, 2019, in press. • In His Own Arms: Events, Actions, Persons. Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press, 2018. • In Times Like These: Essays in Ethics: Situations, Resources, Issues. Nord‑ hausen: Bausch Verlag, 2017. • Blindly Seeing? Essays in Ethics: Discourses, Sayings, Sufferings. Nordhau‑ sen: Bausch Verlag, 2017. • In the Moment of Your Passing: Essays in Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphys‑ ics. Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press, 2015. • Of Three Minds: Essays in Ethics: The Political, the Social, the Global. Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press, 2014.

Professional Collections Edited • Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism, ed. P. McCormick. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 and 2018. • Roman Ingarden: Über das Wesen, hrsg. P. McCormick. Heidelberg: Uni‑ versitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2007. • Symbol, Fiction, Communication, ed. P. McCormick. AE:CanadianAes‑ theticsJournal, 2(1997); • Eco-Ethica et Philosophia Generalis: Festschrift for Imamichi Tomonobu, ed. M. Damnjanovic, P. McCormick, et al. Tokyo: Academic Press, 1992.

174

• Nishitani Keiji‘s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, tr. G. Parkes and S. Aihara. General Editor: P. McCormick, Albany: SUNY, 1990. • Aesthetica et Calonologia: Festschrift for Imamichi Tomonobu, ed. M. Damnjanovic, P. McCormick, et al. Tokyo: Academic Press, 1988. • The Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden: Interpretations and Assessments, ed. P. McCormick and B. Dziemidok, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1988. • Roman Ingarden: Selected Papers in Aesthetics, ed. P. McCormick. Mu‑ nich: Philosophia Verlag, 1986. • Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, tr. Y. Seisaku and R. Carter. General Editor: P. McCormick, Albany: SUNY, 1986. • The Reasons of Art/L’art a ses raisons: Acts of the Xth International Con‑ gress in Aesthetics, ed. P. McCormick. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1985. • Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston. Notre-Dame: University of Notre-Dame Press, 1981. • Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston. Notre-Dame: University of Notre-Dame Press, 1977.

175

LIBRI NIGRI THINKING ACROSS BOUNDARIES

Edited by Hans Rainer Sepp The libri nigri meet preferentially at sites where the boundaries of realities, standpoints, disciplines as well as cultural traditions and traditions of knowledge come into view and where their assumptions are negotiable. To trace their intentions of reasoning is more important than the search for the reasons themselves; the daring experiment means more than the effectual model; disturbing action more than the drive towards safeguarding. Since the sites for decisive action are found mostly on the fringes and not at the centers and since boundaries not only function as limits but also simultaneously cover up the potential for difference and otherness, this series will also not refrain from entering the terrain of the Utopian.

1

Hans Rainer Sepp Über die Grenze Prolegomena zu einer Philosophie des Transkulturellen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-792-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-793-0

2

Yoshiko Oshima Zen – anders denken? Zugleich ein Versuch über Zen und Heidegger 2. Aufl. broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-846-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-847-0

3

Max Lorenzen Philosophie der Nachmoderne Die Transformation der Kultur – Virtualität und Globalisierung Herausgegeben von Cathrin Nielsen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-668-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-668-1

4

Hisaki Hashi und Friedrich G. Wallner (Hg.) Globalisierung des Denkens in Ost und West Resultate des Österreichisch-Japanischen Dialogs broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-555-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-560-8

5

Aleš Novák Heideggers Bestimmung des Bösen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-650-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-651-3

6

André Julien S. E. Faict Philosophische Voraussetzungen des interkulturellen Dialogs Die vergleichende Philosophie von Hajime Nakamura im Dialog mit Anthropologie und Hermeneutik broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-683-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-684-1

7

Peter Schwankl Diplomatisches Verhalten Ein phänomenologischer Versuch über das Wesen des Diplomatischen Herausgegeben von Georg Lechner broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-517-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-516-5

8

Paul Janssen Vom zersprungenen Weltwerden broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-685-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-686-5

9

Constantin Noica De dignitate Europae Übersetzt von Georg Scherg Herausgegeben von Mădălina Diaconu broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-708-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-709-1

10

Constantin Noica Briefe zur Logik des Hermes Übersetzt von Christian Ferencz-Flatz und Stefan Moosdorf broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-434-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-435-9

11

Ananta Charan Sukla (ed.) Art and Expression Contemporary Perspectives in the Occidental and Oriental Traditions broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-710-7 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-711-4

12

Dean Komel Den Nihilismus verwinden Ein slowenisches Postscript zum 20. Jahrhundert broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-712-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-713-8

13

Tatiana Shchyttsova (Hg.) In statu nascendi Geborensein und intergenerative Dimension des menschlichen Miteinanderseins broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-716-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-688-9

14

Chung-Chi Yu and Kwok-ying Lau (eds.) Phenomenology and Human Experience broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-722-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-723-7

15

Daniel Aebli Wie modern ist die Antike? Studien und Skizzen zur Altertumswissenschaft broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-729-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-730-5

16

Hiroo Nakamura Für den Frieden broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-731-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-732-9

17

Günter Fröhlich Anthropologische Wege Ulmer Stadthausvorträge broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-733-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-734-3

18

Hans-Dieter Bahr Die Anwesenheit des Gastes Entwurf einer Xenosophie broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-761-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-762-6

19

Massimo Mezzanzanica Von Dilthey zu Levinas Wege im Zwischenbereich von Lebensphilosophie, Neukantianismus und Phänomenologie broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-750-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-751-0

20

Klaus Kanzog Mit Auge und Ohr Studien zur komplementären Wahrnehmung broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-784-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-785-5

21

Silvia Stoller und Gerhard Unterthurner (Hg.) Entgrenzungen der Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik Festschrift für Helmuth Vetter zum 70. Geburtstag broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-771-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-772-5

22

Claus C. Schnorrenberger Chinesische Medizin – Placebo, Wissenschaft oder Wirklichkeit? broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-776-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-777-0

23

Detlef Thiel Maßnahmen des Erscheinens Friedlaender/Mynona im Gespräch mit Schelling, Husserl, Benjamin und Derrida broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-782-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-783-1

24

Leonidas Donskis Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009–2012 broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-799-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-800-5

25

Hartmut Buchner Heidegger und Japan – Japan und Heidegger Vorläufiges zum west-östlichen Gespräch broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-836-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-837-1

26

Kateřina Šolcová Comenius im Blick Der Briefwechsel zwischen Milada Blekastad und Dmitrij Tschižewskij Deutsch-Tschechische Ausgabe broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-843-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-844-9

27

Karin Knobel Poetik des Staubes bei Goethe und Hafis broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-838-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-839-5

28

Ryôsuke Ohashi Schnittpunkte Essays zum ost-westlichen-Gespräch Erster Band: Dimensionen des Ästhetischen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-859-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-860-9

29

Ryôsuke Ohashi Schnittpunkte Essays zum ost-westlichen-Gespräch Zweiter Band: Deutsch-Japanische Denkwege broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-885-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-886-9

30

Aleš Novák (Hg.) Grenzen der Transzendenz Aus dem Tschechischen übersetzt von Jana Krötzsch broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-854-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-855-5

31

Boško Tomašević Hervorgang des Seins Das ontologische Geschehen des Dichtens broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-952-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-953-8

32

Gerard Visser Nichts ist geschenkt Ein philosophischer Essay über die Seele Aus dem Niederländischen übersetzt von Anna Sikora broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-871-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-872-2

33

Marcin Rebes Der Streit um die transzendentale Wahrheit Heidegger und Levinas broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-942-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-943-9

34

Jürgen Trinks Überleben des Phänomens im Symbolischen Studien zur sprachphänomenologischen Kulturwissenschaft broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-875-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-876-0

35

Martin Cajthaml Europe and the Care of the Soul Jan Patočka’s Conception of the Spiritual Foundations of Europe With a Preface by Peter McCormick broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-887-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-888-3

36

Leonidas Donskis Das Ende von Ideologie und Utopie? Moralität und Kulturkritik im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Cathrin Nielsen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-883-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-884-5

37

Dean Komel Kontemplationen Entwürfe zur phänomenologischen Hermeneutik broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-903-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-904-0

38

Armin Wildermuth Findlinge Gefundenes und Erfundenes broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-944-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-945-3

39

Hisaki Hashi (Hg.) Denkdisziplinen von Ost und West Interdisziplinäre Philosophie in einer globalen Welt broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-047-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-048-2

40

Markus Ophälders Konstruktion von Erfahrung Versuch über Walter Benjamin broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-083-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-084-0

41

Ivan Chvatík and Lubica Ucník (eds.) Asubjective Phenomenology Jan Patočka’s Project in the Broader Context of his Work broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-993-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-994-1

42

Terri Jane Hennings Writing Against Aesthetic Ideology Tom Sharpe’s The Great Pursuit and Paul Auster’s City of Glass broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-180-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-181-6

43

Irina Hron (Hg.) Einheitsdenken Figuren von Ganzheit, Präsenz und Transzendenz nach der Postmoderne broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-995-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-996-5

44

Nicole Thiemer Zwischen Hermes und Hestia Hermeneutische Lektüren zu Heidegger und Derrida broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-946-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-947-7

45

Sumalee Mahanarongchai Health and Disease in Buddhist Minds broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-950-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-951-4

46

Fengli Lan and Friedrich G. Wallner (eds.) The Concepts of Health and Disease From the Viewpoint of four Cultures broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-948-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-949-1

47

Fengli Lan Metaphor The Weaver of Chinese Medicine With an Introduction by Friedrich Wallner broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-020-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-039-0

48

Kurt Greiner und Martin J. Jandl (Hg.) Bizzarosophie Radikalkreatives Forschen im Dienste der akademischen Psychotherapie broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-014-7 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-032-1

49

Martin Nitsche (ed.) Image in Space Contributions to a Topology of Images broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-985-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-986-6

50

Friedrich G. Wallner and Gerhard Klünger (eds.) Buddhism – Science and Medicine Interpretations, Applications, and Misuse broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-052-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-053-6

51

Severin Müller Verwandelte Ferne Phänomenologische Analysen zu realen und imaginären Mobilitäten broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-089-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-090-1

52

Severin Müller Transformationen Studien zu Zeit, Bewegung und Imagination

53

Friedrich G. Wallner and Gerhard Klünger (eds.) Constructive Realism Philosophy, Science, and Medicine broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-102-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-829-6

54

Anna Maria Martini Phänomenologie der Zweigeschlechtlichkeit Kenotische und transzendente Momente und ihre anthropologische Bedeutung broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-125-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-126-7

55

Petr Kouba Margins of Phenomenology broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-144-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-145-9

56

Klaus Kanzog Militärische Leitbilder in Spielfilmen der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre Faktizität, Kunstfreiheit, Rhetorik broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-173-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-174-8

57

Dragan Jakovljević Erkenntnisgestalten und Handlungsanweisungen Abhandlungen zur Erkenntnislehre und praktischen Philosophie Mit einem Nachwort von Dariusz Aleksandrowicz broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-202-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-203-5

58

Fengli Lan, Friedrich G. Wallner, Gerhard Klünger (eds.) Lifestyle and Health broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-235-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-236-3

59

Hans-Christian Günther Nachgehakt (Un)zeitgemäße Betrachtungen zu Religion, Ethik und Politik broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-287-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-288-2

60

Ľubica Učník and Anita Williams (eds.) Phenomenology and the Problem of Meaning in Human Life and History

61

James McGuirk Eros, Otherness, Tyranny The Indictment and Defence of the Philosophical Life in Plato, Nietzsche, and Lévinas broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-295-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-296-7

62.1

Daniel Aebli Entwicklungslogik des Schönen Erster Band: Studien zur Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaft ISBN 978-3-95948-309-4

62.2

Daniel Aebli Entwicklungslogik des Schönen Zweiter Band: Studien zur Theorie der Kunst- und allgemeinen Geschichte, besonders zu Winckelmann ISBN 978-3-95948-310-0

63

Peter McCormick Blindly Seeing Essays in Ethics: Discourses, Sayings, Sufferings ISBN 978-3- 95948-305-6

64

Peter McCormick In Times Like These Essays in Ethics: Situations, Resources, Issues ISBN 978-3- 95948-306-3

65

Madeleine Kasten, Rico Sneller, Gerard Visser (eds.) Benjamin’s Figures: Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities ISBN 978-3-95948-344-5

66

Chris Bremmers, Andrew Smith, Jean-Pierre Wils (eds.) Beyond Nihilism? ISBN 978-3-95948-342-1

67

Ellen Wilmes Nicht-Dualität. Dōgen Zenji trifft Michel Henry Das absolute Idem des Zen – eine Über-setzung unter dem Blickwinkel der radikalen Lebensphänomenologie ISBN 978-3-95948-352-0

68

Gerhard Burda Mediale Identität/en Politik, Psychoanalyse und die Phantasmen von Verbindung und Trennung ISBN 978-3-95948-368-1

69

Veronika Teryngerová and Hans Rainer Sepp (eds.) Ethics in Politics? ISBN 978-3-95948-369-8

70

Giovanni Jan Giubilato (Hg. / ed.) Lebendigkeit der Phänomenologie / Vividness of Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-95948-419-0

71

Vít Pokorný Psychonauticon A Transdisciplinary Interpretation of Psychedelic Experiences ISBN 978-3-95948-375-9

72

Eddo Evink Transcendence and Inscription Jacques Derrida on Ethics, Religion and Metaphysics ISBN 978-3-95948-418-3

73

Friedrich Hausen Philosophie der Psychobiologie Hans Lungwitz im Kontext prominenter Positionen und Diskurse ISBN 978-3-95948-478-7

74

Alfred Barth Publish or Perish! Ein Schwarzbuch der Wissenschaft ISBN 978-3-95948-333-9

75

Peter McCormick Modernities Histories, Beliefs, and Values ISBN 978-3- 95948-441-1

76

Peter McCormick Solicitations Poverties, Discourses, and Limits ISBN 978-3-95948-442-8

77

Benjamin Kaiser und Hilmar Schmiedl-Neuburg (Hg.) Philosophie und Literatur ISBN 978-3-95948-454-1

78

Cathrin Nielsen und Karel Novotný (Hg.) Die Welt und das Reale / The World and the Real / Le monde et le réel

79

Saman Pushpakumara The Tremendous Power of the Negative Hegelian Heritage in German, French, British and American Philosophical Traditions ISBN 978-3-95948-455-8

80

Eder Soares Santos Paths of Science of Man in Heidegger ISBN 978-3-95948-459-6