FRAMEWORKS OR TOOLS?
On the Status of Concepts in Humanistic Inquiry
This is a study of two closely related concepts—“will” and “person”—which have proven indispensable to Western humanistic inquiry and its ongoing, albeit enormously diverse, attempts to develop a satisfactory account of human agency. More implicitly, what follows is also a study of our changed relationship to concepts and, hence, to the nature, purpose, and responsibility of thinking and knowledge. The argument to be advanced hinges on a number of interlocking claims and objectives that should be sketched right away, if only in preliminary fashion. A first claim is historical in kind, albeit just as emphatically not historicist. Its purport is that, for reasons to be considered shortly, both will and person—as well as a number of other key concepts of humanistic inquiry entwined with these notions—undergo momentous and, I argue, deeply problematic change in European modernity. First, the scope of their relevancy to humanistic inquiry, as indeed that very project itself, contracts. Second, for a variety of reasons having to do with transformations internal to philosophical theology and the rise of naturalist and reductionist approaches sponsored by the emergence of a scientific culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the internal coherence of these key concepts and their centrality within humanistic (interpretive) inquiry erodes over time. Finally, given modernity’s accelerating commitment to an ostensibly value-neutral ideal of knowledge anchored in efficient causation alone, conceptions of a responsible will and a person defined by its relation to others are progressively relegated to the margins of philosophical inquiry. Along with a host of contiguous notions (e.g., judgment, responsibility, self-awareness, teleology, etc.), they ultimately succumb to a process of pervasive forgetting. As remains to be seen, such forgetting was inevitable considering the extent to which post-Hobbesian thought had lost sight of, or had rejected outright, the ancient view that both the meaning and the significance of humanistic concepts are inseparable from their complex and often agonistic history of transmission.
To approach modernity as a condition of progressive conceptual amnesia, which in turn results in an increasingly stunted outlook on human agency, undoubtedly will ruffle some feathers in what (often at its own peril) for the past thirty-five years or so has been reconstituted as the “profession” of the humanities. A first way of arguing the point would be to establish a causal connection between modernity’s diminishing grasp of concepts as dialectically evolving, hermeneutic frameworks and the professionalization of humanistic knowledge that, in David Simpson’s pointed formulation, has all but become “divorced from content” and is vaguely presumed to be “useful in itself.”1 For however one may feel about it, there can be no question that for the past four decades or so, the humanities (especially in North America) have undergone enormous change as regards their institutional cache, their methodological orientation, and, ultimately, their perceived object of inquiry. Notably, as the preoccupation with finding a “definitive” method of inquiry intensified, the identity of the object or core questions to be engaged by humanistic study seemed to grow more obscure. Post-structuralism (in its various psychoanalytic, philosophical, anthropological, or aesthetic guises), deconstruction, new historicism, cultural materialism, queer studies, post-colonialism, and the more recent incursion of neuro-scientific methodologies into the humanities are just some of the more conspicuous instances of this shift. Cumulatively these approaches reveal how a proliferation of methodologies tends to shift the object of inquiry and inflate the number of sub-specializations, while simultaneously shrinking their intellectual scope; one is left with the impression of a rather dubious mathematical procedure, something we might call multiplication-by-division. To be sure, the quest for a sharply defined method, reliable in its application and guaranteed to produce marketable results, hardly amounts to a new development; it had crucially shaped European modernity in the era of Bacon, Boyle, Gassendi, Newton, and Leibniz, and if anything its much belated arrival and euphoric reception in (American) humanistic inquiry in 1966 at the newly inaugurated Johns Hopkins Humanities Center seemed to betoken a new, heightened legitimacy for the humanities as a bona fide science.
Not considered, however, was the question, previously raised by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, as to whether a commitment to some determinate method within the humanities might not entail unwarranted and unsustainable assumptions about the kind of knowledge to be thus produced. Indeed, the proliferation of increasingly short-lived, and often adversarial methodological prescriptions since the 1960s suggests that while the emergence of “theory” had undeniably taken control of departments and schools of inquiry throughout North America, its outlook on the long durée and complex genealogies of inquiry implicitly at stake was not so much as a body of work to be diacritically engaged but as so much fossilized intellectual substance to be historicized, syllogistically disproven, or in some other fashion overcome. Simply put, the ethos underlying the practice of “theory” since the 1960s in North America has been typically one of emancipation, and as a result its approaches have been axiomatically conceived as so many methods or techniques, to be applied to various fields and objects of inquiry. Compounded by a pragmatist and anti-metaphysical stance whose long history in Anglo-American and British culture David Simpson has traced some time ago, the history of “theory” that has shaped North American academia for several decades now has largely devolved into a quest—rather in the tradition of Bacon—for an inductive and universally applicable method of reducing contingent phenomena to infinitely repeatable certitudes.2
With barely concealed irony, Paul de Man’s 1982 essay “The Resistance to Theory” thus concludes with the faintly dispiriting observation that “technically correct rhetorical readings may be boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasant, but they are irrefutable.” Modernity’s most ardent wish—the wish not to be deceived or, in de Man’s parlance, to engage written works in a way “that would stay clear of any undue phenomenalization or of any undue grammatical or performative codification of the text”—can ultimately never be granted.3 Given modernity’s conception of knowledge as a series of deductions inexorably following from our embrace of an all-encompassing methodological template, there can be no conclusive triumph of theory (or, in the present instance, a method known as “rhetorical reading”) but only an endless sequence of performative misadventures. Perhaps de Man’s sardonic reflexivity was meant as a gibe at his many followers, so doggedly intent on proselytizing his interpretive approach as a definitive method and, as Nietzsche had put it, repaying their teacher poorly by remaining forever disciples. And yet, to suppose that the professional theorist inhabits a “state of constant suspension” or “undecidability” is to vacillate between a narcissistic indifference concerning basic human questions and an incipient despair over the entire project of theoretical inquiry; for Terry Eagleton, it is the professional narcissism and blatant disregard for historical specificity that have defined postmodern theorizing (“those who are privileged enough not to need to know, for whom there is nothing politically at stake in reasonably accurate cognition, have little to lose by proclaiming the virtues of undecidability”), whereas for David Simpson “the sheer emotional and rhetorical difficulty of remaining in a state of constant suspension . . . seems to have made a place for a headlong retreat from theory and from the dissatisfactions it seems to prescribe.”4
While these criticisms are not without merit, de Man’s argument nevertheless goes to the very heart of method—viz., its speculative and seemingly deluded confidence in the eventual attainment of total certainty and impregnable authority. Even a casual reading of Bacon or Newton shows modernity’s quest for objective method to be thoroughly steeped in the spirit of utopia, its heart stirred by that quintessentially modern fantasy: the libido dominandi’s conclusive possession of all phenomena rather than letting them speak and conceiving knowledge as our adequatio to and participation in them. More recently, the proliferation of methodologies (mislabeled as “theory”) and the concurrent multiplication and division of their professed objects of inquiry have only accelerated, at least in part because of the humanities’ increasingly frantic quest for greater institutional prestige and also in consequence of their rather naïve attempt to incorporate themselves as a modern profession. While highly effective for information-based sciences, professionalism turns out to be inapposite to interpretive disciplines that require our sustained immersion in a many-layered past composed of intellectual genealogies and their often conflicting lines of transmission. Not surprisingly, the price of “professionalization” (to use a word of which college accrediting organizations, graduate school deans, and funding agencies seeking to maximize their returns are equally enamored) has been steep. Far too often, individuals working in the humanities are tempted to tailor their research projects to minor grants made available by (non-researching) career administrators keen to promote research on topics whose importance they have mimetically deduced from other administrators. The projects in question tend to be labeled (often well before their completion) as “cutting-edge,” interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary while raising doubts as to whether those pursuing them any longer enjoy a clear grasp of what constitutes disciplinarity. A particularly farcical aspect of the humanities’ “professionalization” involves the haphazard and naïve uses of instructional technology urged upon faculty by university administrators, themselves gullible captives of corporations sensibly minding their own business interests. Conceivably, a Power-Point presentation may be a sensible tool for conveying information to a panel of experts in oncology or marketing; yet one need not be a Luddite to recognize it as a wholly inapposite medium for developing and presenting a nuanced and sustained interpretive effort.
Many of these and other symptoms of what Raymond Tallis has provocatively termed “the suicide of the humanities” strongly correlate with the humanities’ prolonged bout of “science envy.”5 What Coleridge had already indicted as his contemporaries’ “asthmatic” style of thinking and writing—riveted by new information yet ill at ease with sustained reflection—is particularly evident in the current preoccupation, unparalleled in the history of humanistic inquiry, with devising forever new techniques, concepts, and methods.6 The missing link between the recent phenomenon of a fully professionalized humanities and the latter’s pervasive misapprehension of method as “theory” is modernity’s quintessentially utopian nature—its nervous or, in Coleridge’s combative phrase “finger-active, brain-lazy” (CM, 2:648), quest for anticipating and seizing the new. Concurrently, a humanistic inquiry legitimated primarily by its professional organization and methodological sophistication will naturally reenact modernity’s iconoclastic, not to say allergic reaction against the mere suggestion that to know might depend on the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues such as patience, good sense, moderation, and studiousness (rather than blind and fleeting “curiosity”)—most of which modernity had so unwisely anathemized. Overall, then, the way that the humanities have constituted themselves as an aggregate of disciplines obeying, by and large, a historicist framework and procedural ethos since the mid-nineteenth century shows them to be a specific epiphenomenon of modernity and, thus, inauspiciously positioned as regards a critical and comprehensive assessment of the modern project’s limitations and antagonisms.
Still, the objective of what follows is not to indulge in a jeremiad but, rather, to show by example that if there is to be a future for humanistic and interpretive knowledge, it will hinge less on the contrivance of yet another theory or slate of technical terms than on the sustained retrieval and critical engagement of some key concepts that (so my argument) have proven indispensable for meaningful humanistic inquiry since its beginnings in Plato and Aristotle. Inasmuch as such a retrieval is successful, it will also restore a clearer understanding of the distinctive nature and function of concepts within those disciplines committed to the cultivation of interpretive knowledge. To make that case in responsible and hopefully convincing fashion it is imperative to recognize the central and indispensable role of agency and action to any interpretive discipline. More than anything, it is the naturalist and, especially, the reductionist legacy of Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, and others that has estranged us from the abiding and unique phenomenon of human intelligence as it is realized in action—in contradistinction to a mechanistic and literally mindless notion of process or behavior. To that end, what follows will seek to recover the history of two conceptions that are always in play when questions of action and agency are being considered: those of will and person. The first sections of Part II thus trace the idea of the will (to specify it as the human will would be to commit a pleonasm) with a strong focus on its relation to the emotions, the intellect, and their respective involvement with the Platonic logos. In time, the notion of the will crystallized by absorbing and recalibrating a number of other concepts (desire, self-possession, judgment, teleology, etc.) into a complex and progressively self-aware hermeneutic tradition that dates back to ancient Greek thought, its subsequent cultivation in Stoic and neo-Platonic philosophy, and that first culminates in Augustine’s supple and profound synthesis of these traditions with the relatively new field of Christian theology. Likewise, an intellectual archeology of the idea of person in both Christian and (to a lesser extent) Jewish philosophical theology, will be undertaken in Part III, which traces Coleridge’s profound investment (unique among his contemporaries) in that tradition.
Over the course of some 1,800 years spanning from fifth-century Athens to the Dominican synthesis of Aristotelian and Augustinian thought in thirteenth-century Paris, Western philosophy and theology had gradually evolved a coherent and supple conception of human agency as embodied, capable of intellectual self-awareness, constitutively related to other rational agents, and hence incontrovertibly capable of making (and being responsible for) choices. It should go without saying that the capacity of choosing implies both a reflexive awareness of the agent invested with it, as well as the perennially looming possibility of his or her failing to exercise that capacity in timely and responsible fashion, which is not to say that what follows means to deploy the concept of awareness as synonymous with some version of Cartesian self-presence or certainty. On the contrary, in both its genesis and eventual awareness the self is essentially bound up with its relatedness to other persons—a relation that is only consummated when the other person becomes a “thou” rather than an impersonal he or she. As remains to be seen, that point explains why the phenomenology of conscience was to assume such pivotal importance in the later Coleridge’s philosophical theology.
The premise for an inquiry into human agency and action—from Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle onward to the Stoics, Augustine, and all the way to Aquinas—had been that, far from being antagonists, will and intellect were essentially and productively entwined. Hence a coherent account of responsible action had to resist the temptation, sometimes observable in the late Augustine and especially conspicuous in his modern descendants (Martin Luther, René Descartes, et al.) to make one or the other aspect wholly dominant and to construe the lesser one as being merely epiphenomenal. What supported this classical view of human agency was, ultimately, the “onto-theological” axiom that contingency and doubt were but natural entailments of our manifestly imperfect modes of apprehension and cognition. Thus one divine form of reason was taken to have created and continued to pervade the cosmos—which, after all, signifies not a mere inventory of objects but the permanent and rational “order” of things; and the telos of a meaningful and justifiable life could only be to apprehend and participate in that logos as fully as possible, be it in the kind of rational contemplation (theoria) that Aristotle unfolds at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics or the mystical visio beatifica that St. Augustine and his mother, Monica, share in Book 9 of the Confessions, and which continued to be the terminus ad quem organizing most narratives of human flourishing well into the early modern era. The great objective of human existence did not involve the epistemological conquest and material domination of the world but the sustained engagement and approximation of the logos of which that world was a fluctuating and inscrutable manifestation.
The contrasting vision, and the principal antagonist of Platonic, Christian, and other more “secular” forms of humanism, is found in the reductionist, naturalist, and quasi-legalistic accounts of mind and reason pioneered by William of Ockham and his voluntarist successors. It is in the work of Hobbes, Gassendi, Locke, Mandeville, Hartley, La Mettrie, Helvetius, Hume, Priestley, and Godwin, among others, that we encounter its methodological and, in time, emphatically secular legacy in fully developed form. What Coleridge would somewhat polemically label the “corpuscular school” of inquiry, of whose distant sources in Democritus, Leucippus, Protagoras, Epicurus, and Lucretius he is well aware, eventually culminates in the strident anti-psychologism of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Ryle, and in concurrent behaviorist attempts at tethering human action to mono-causal input/output ratios. In our own time, this project has been refashioned into a neuro-scientific utopia of a wholly deterministic account of human consciousness and action—one that, to the extent that it expects to succeed, must logically abandon the notion of the human as a distinctive intellectual and ethical agent in favor of a strictly quantitative conception of our biological, carbon-churning species. Even this thumbnail sketch already suggests that humanistic inquiry faces enormous challenges that are further compounded by a recrudescent utilitarianism of state legislators, funding agencies, and university administrators unabashedly and single-mindedly committed to the “bottom line,” fixated on the grant- and publicity-getting potential of some disciplines and, as a result, prone to confuse means with ends.
To be sure, the idea of humanistic inquiry—to say nothing of its recent and troubling corporate incarnation as “the profession of the humanities”—had never really enjoyed a “golden age.” Far more plausibly, its history can be read as a series of focused and often intensely adversarial exchanges with a variety of competing intellectual projects—among them Ockham’s divine-command ethic; Luther’s dystopic, quasi-Manichean theory of the will; Hobbes’s aggressively voluntarist and artificial concept of personhood; Locke’s psychological hedonism and its underlying nominalist epistemology; Mandeville’s and Hume’s non-cognitive model of the passions; and so on. With varying degrees of success (and by no means always taking the same view), Thomas More, Erasmus, the Cambridge Platonists, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Coleridge, John Henry Newman, and others thus rise to defend some version of a Platonic cum Christian model of human agency where consciousness is inseparable from self-awareness, and where the integrity and uniqueness of the human person arises both from a productive alignment of will and intellect and from the person’s prima facie ethical being—viz., as an agent constitutively related and obligated to other persons. Agency here is not conceived epistemologically—that is, as involving (or lacking) some technical skill for solving situation-specific and ostensibly value-neutral puzzles of what to do. Rather, it pivots on the far more complex and value-saturated mystery of what kind of person one seeks to be.7
In truth, while humanistic inquiry has always been a dialectical, not to say agonistic endeavor, born of contradiction and indeed thriving on it, such a pronouncement is easy to make yet hard to sustain once its implications begin to reveal themselves. The postmodern response to that challenge has all too often been to radicalize the impulse to historicize to the point “where continuities simply dissolve [and] history becomes no more than a galaxy of current conjectures, a cluster of eternal presents, which is to say hardly history at all.”8 Still, even as the myriad positions and antagonisms comprising the flow of intellectual history is liable to be experienced as bewildering and seemingly pointless, it would be a mistake to think of contradiction as simply a gratuitous obstacle to be removed or, better yet, circumnavigated on some imagined royal road toward clear and definitive insight. In fact, there is no such road, quite simply because contradiction “lies at the heart of movement, whether that movement takes place in things, in ideas, or in language. Contradiction generates movement. Contradiction does not threaten ideas, but it suggests their unrealized potentiality, the inadequacy of a present formulation, or the becoming which is their actual form of being.”9
Michael Buckley’s eminently Hegelian formulation does not consider an alternative scenario—one altogether central to my own argument: viz., there is no guarantee that the recurrent tension between two distinct conceptions of human agency and, implicitly, between two modes of knowing—a Christian-Platonic framework and an ancient atomist/modern naturalist one—will necessarily (nor, indeed, inadvertently) advance knowledge. To speak of “contradictory” views is to prejudge the conflict of views as dialectically generative. Another way of approaching the conflict between humanist-interpretive and strictly naturalist (or deterministic and reductionist) models of human agency would be to view the two paradigms as outright “incommensurable.” On that account, what Plato attempts vis-à-vis the Sophists, what Augustine seeks vis-à-vis the Pelagians, what Shaftesbury and Hutcheson seek to accomplish in their running battle with Hobbesian and Lockean naturalism; and what Coleridge pursues vis-à-vis Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and countless other thinkers, is a concerted attempt at securing basic humanistic concepts (judgment, responsibility, teleology, transcendence, personhood) against reductionist attempts to quarantine and ultimately reject these concepts as merely subjective and, in time, altogether irrational and unintelligible. Recoiling from what Charles Taylor calls “the illusion of the rational ‘obviousness’ of the closed perspective,” those thinkers to whom the present study is unabashedly sympathetic (Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Coleridge, and Newman; and in our time, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Sokolowski, and Louis Dupré) diversely seek to defend, preserve, and further elucidate a nuanced and differentiated conception of human agency against persistent attempts by modern rationalism, mechanism, and determinism to reject it as indefensible on epistemological and methodological grounds.10 The principal tension, then, is not between two opposing conceptions of the human but, more fundamentally, between two strictly incommensurable views of how even to approach human phenomena to begin with.
A first and decisive question to be taken up thus concerns the status and operative logic of concepts in humanistic inquiry: viz., whether we recognize them to have a history, to signify for us only on the condition of our gradually internalizing that history—understood not as a lifeless catalogue of earlier usages but as a dynamic tradition indispensable for orienting ourselves in the present by honing our basic intuitions and interpretive capacities. As the following case studies in philosophy, theology, and (occasionally) literature seek to illustrate, modernity’s gradual flattening out and ultimate forgetting of the hermeneutic and normative dimension of those key concepts here under consideration was inevitable given how “modernity” understood itself. To be sure, there is no “singular modernity,” as Fredric Jameson has rightly cautioned; rather, there are “the many narratives,” several of which Charles Taylor has recently sought to disentangle as so many epiphenomena of the secular, and they certainly do not all date from the same period. Following Louis Dupré, Stephen Gaukroger, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre the present study locates the breakdown of the onto-theological conception of the logos in the Franciscan critique of Aquinas launched by Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and, especially, in Ockham’s startling proposition that reason is a function, indeed a projection of power, rather than the criterion for its responsible exercise. Others might prefer to locate that break later, say, in the debate waged by Luther and Erasmus regarding the freedom of the will (traced in Michael Gillespie’s recent work), in the seventeenth century’s preoccupation with putting natural rights on a strictly secular footing (an argument first advanced by Leo Strauss and more recently inflected by Knud Haakonssen), or in modernity’s evolving preoccupation with models of self-possession or autonomy (a story unfolded in great detail by Jerome Schneewind). As regards the startling disintegration of classical models of teleology and the underlying, axiomatic view of nature as entelecheia that Aristotle develops in his Physics and elsewhere, one may certainly come to different conclusions as to whether the contestation of this model begins with Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, or Newton, or perhaps as late as Hume’s Dialogues.
Yet the present study is not concerned with pinpointing an origin or even multiple origins of modernity, which indeed “is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category.”11 Rather, the objective of what follows is to illustrate a fundamental change in the habitus and self-understanding of humanistic inquiry and with tabulating the costs of that shift, which has transformed the very idea of reason itself. To consider the changing understanding of concepts in the modern era (a transformation that prima facie defines modernity as a distinctive epochē) also means to apprehend the costs of several other, closely related shifts: viz., from a contemplative to an active stance; and from a mode of knowing that takes itself to be participating in reason to one that takes itself to be producing rational order by applying concepts to what is now posited as a universe replete with puzzling and ostensibly isolated objects and phenomena—a world seemingly devoid of rational order except such as we can authoritatively ascribe to it. This takes us to the second major claim advanced by this study, a claim that is philosophical or meta-conceptual in nature. For the main characteristic of modernity’s changed intellectual habitus is an acutely self-conscious quest for an accumulative, inter-subjectively demonstrable, and systemic model of knowledge qua “information.”12 By inaugurating itself as an epochē, a break with the past, by repudiating cosmological and metaphysical frameworks (i.e., substantial forms, entelechies, and the divine source of reason [logos] itself), and by supplanting ontological truth with a quest for contingent certainties sought in the methodical, accumulative, and increasingly compartmentalized study of nature (including human nature), modernity developed a fundamentally changed and far more restrictive understanding of the quintessentially human act of conceptualization and articulacy. While modern scientific inquiry “retains the formal meaning of the one all-encompassing science, the science of the totality of what is [Totalität des Seienden],” it no longer understands that objective as ontologically given but as a project, an edifice to be predicatively realized: “in a bold elevation of the meaning of universality, begun by Descartes, this new philosophy seeks nothing less than to encompass, in the unity of a theoretical system, all meaningful questions in a rigorous scientific manner, with an apodictically intelligible methodology, in an unending but rationally ordered progress of inquiry.”13
What Hans-Georg Gadamer has traced as the widening gap between truth and method stirs to life in Ockham’s strident repudiation of Aristotelian elements in Dominican theology, and in the nominalist pathos with which he shifts the locus of truth from intrinsically rational and timeless universals to singularities whose meaning and authority pivot on their being ordained and licensed by a divine will that consequently appears not just inscrutable but potentially discontinuous. While the secular implications of Ockham’s theological arguments would not reveal themselves for some time, a fundamental shift had taken place. Thus Ockham restricts human cognition to what can be demonstrably and verifiably conceptualized—that is, to the isolated, unrepeatable, and non-generalizable singular object. In time, Bacon would treat each of these singularities as a building block for a systematic edifice of abstract, lawful, and mathematical “idealities.” Thus Ockham clears the ground for modernity’s reductionist idea of knowledge as “information” that can be expressed as a mathematical constant. As Hans Jonas puts it, “for the modern idea of understanding nature, the least intelligent has become the most intelligible, the least reasonable the most rational. At the bottom of all rationality or ‘mathematics’ in nature’s order lies the mere fact of their being quantitative constants in the behavior of matter, or ‘the principle of uniformity’ as such, which found its first statement in the law of inertia—surely no mark of immanent reason.”14 As we shall see in Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, and above all in Hume, naturalist and, especially, reductionist accounts tend to beg the question of action and agency on a large scale, quite simply because from the outset they only accept as “proof” something that must be non-human, a-semantic, a-rational, and ultimately unintelligible; reductionism begins by positing (without arguing the point) that all causation is mechanical, rather than something imagined, reasoned, chosen, and enacted. Inasmuch as there are to be only efficient (never final) causes, causation itself is pared down to the strictly unintelligible instant and, in effect, consumes itself in its mechanical occurrence; for modernity to recognize a cause as efficient, the latter must be denuded of all memory or awareness.
Yet to take that view, for which Ockham’s preoccupation with God’s potentia absoluta had crucially prepared the ground, means to quarantine what can be known—including the isolated, gratuitous, and inexplicable acts of will exercised by an omnipotent (if enigmatic) God—as strictly singular occurrences that bear no discernible relationship to any other act, event, or phenomenon. As a result, the relation of human inquiry to divine reason is fundamentally thrown into doubt and, indeed, has been suspended indefinitely. For the ancient conception of the logos had implied the objective, indeed ontological, continuity and hierarchy of the cosmos, even if Aristotle already had to defend that premise against Democritus’s and Leucippus’s atomism and its irrational, radically skeptical implications. For Edmund Husserl, the rise of positivism “in a manner of speaking decapitates philosophy.” For it dramatically narrows the very concept of reason, such that questions of human flourishing, and of interpersonal obligation and responsibility are effectively quarantined and, as I shall argue, gradually forgotten: “The positivistic concept of science in our time is, historically speaking, a residual concept [Restbegriff]. It has dropped all the questions which had been considered under the now narrower, now broader concepts of metaphysics, including all questions vaguely termed ‘ultimate and highest.’ Examined closely, all the excluded questions derive their inseparable unity from the fact that they contain . . . the problems of reason in all its particular forms. For reason is the explicit theme in the disciplines concerning knowledge (i.e., of true and genuine, rational knowledge), of true and genuine valuation (genuine values as values of reason), of ethical action (truly good acting, acting from practical reason).”15
Written against the backdrop of fast-rising irrationalism and political violence, Husserl’s 1935 Prague lectures on The Crisis of European Sciences raise questions that bear pondering no less today, and which the following study means to keep in play throughout. Is a strictly procedural (methodological) outlook on reason even conceivable, or might the notion of the logos ultimately prove intrinsically normative? Conversely, what could possibly legitimate modernity’s conception of rationality as a “historically specific” consensus (social, scientific, moral)—in short, as literally nothing more than a “convention” (Lat. convenire) and hence as endlessly negotiable, reversible, and liable to fragmentation into a plurality of rationalities? As Brad S. Gregory has recently shown in impressive detail, that development constitutes the Reformation’s lasting and powerful legacy. In particular, the “transformation from a substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights” was dramatically accelerated by magisterial Protestantism’s inability to contain the fragmentation of radical Protestant communities of belief; and it was just this “constitution of exclusive moral communities [that] would eventually suggest to some people that morality itself is contingent and constructed, or at least that its basis and precepts are separable from religion.”16 It is this disintegration of a coherent, normative, and supra-personal framework (one not based on claim rights) that was eventually ratified as the supposedly self-evident truth of Hume’s fact/value distinction, one widely, if unthinkingly embraced by a great many individuals working in the humanities today. What Leo Strauss has analyzed as the “noble nihilism” of Weberian sociology—arguably the most salient instance of an entire discipline premised on the fact/value divide—will at various turns be of concern in this book. For now, the question is simply whether there can truly be multiple (and supposedly competing) rationalities, and whether, as Max Weber had argued, a conflict between “values cannot be resolved by human reason.”17
Echoing some of the most salient points made by his one-time teacher, Martin Heidegger in his 1938 essay “The Age of the World Picture” indexes several traits distinctive of modern knowledge: increasing specialization; precisely quantifiable findings; the transposition of natural phenomena into hypothesized idealities; an insistence on their repeatable, experimental verification, etc. He then asks whether “every epoch has its distinctive world picture . . . or whether it is a distinctly modern form of conceptualization that raises the question concerning the world picture.” As it turns out, “world picture” for Heidegger constitutes not merely, indeed, not even primarily, some second-hand depiction (Abklatsch) of the world as it is ostensibly at hand. Rather, it furnishes us with a distinctively modern kind of orientation. That is what is meant by the colloquial phrase of “we get the picture” (wir sind über etwas im Bilde). Not only does such a picture “represent” the world for us, but it denotes “all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it—as a system” (daß es in all dem, was zu ihm gehört und in ihm zusammensteht, als System vor uns steht).18 For Heidegger, who in this regard sounds far more sanguine about the modern project than the late Husserl, what resonates in the German idiom of “getting the picture” (im Bilde sein) is this “being prepared and adjusted to the world” (Gerüstetsein und sich darauf Einrichten). This attitude of a resourceful, autonomous self fully equipped for its encounter with and mastery of the world—words of rather ominous import in 1938—Heidegger intends as a kind of allegory of the modern era:
World picture . . . does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the latter’s representational character. However, wherever being [das Seiende] is not interpreted in this manner, the world also cannot enter into a picture; there can be no world picture. The fact that whatever is comes into being in and in the modality of representation transforms the age in which this occurs into a new age in contrast with the preceding one. The expressions “world picture of the modern age” and “modern world picture” have the same tautological meaning, for they assume something that never could have been before, viz., a medieval and an ancient world picture. The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.19
In what follows, Heidegger’s essay strikes a rather sinister note by suggesting that modern individualism and humanism are anachronistic, quasi-nostalgic reactions against the essentially “corporate” reality that has already established itself; his parsing of “subject” and “individual” is particularly instructive here. In ideologically less troubling language, Louis Dupré has described the “fateful separation” of nature from grace and the resulting conceptualization of nature in increasingly anthropomorphic categories of efficient causality, objective “representation”—a development that begins with Duns Scotus (the subject of Heidegger’s doctoral thesis) and continues well into the late phase of natural theology in the eighteenth century.20
Its ideological encumbrances notwithstanding, Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture” highlights a number of key points. First, the arrival of the Weltbild entails the displacement of two founding concepts of human thought—grace and narrative. Leaving aside the second of these for the moment, we can see how a model of immanent, as it were homespun rationality comes to supplant a notion of divine ratio, rendering it all but unfathomable, incoherent, and ultimately obsolete. Particularly Ockham’s work, to be taken up later on, widens the gap between divine reason and finite, human intellection to the point that the former is no longer an ontological datum on the order of Aquinas’s (in provenance Augustinian) conception of grace. Rather, eternal, benevolent, and providential divine reason disclosed qua grace has mutated from a premise to an inference, and an increasingly tenuous one at that. Consequently, the late medieval and early modern era finds itself far more dependent on elaborating a systematic model, or Weltbild, independent of any transcendent guarantees or presuppositions. For Descartes, truly the prototypical modern thinker, it is thus “mind, not the universe, [which] bears the evidence for the divine existence. Just as the divine truth guarantees the external physical world, so the divine infinity removes from this universe any discernible final order and purpose.”21 That is, following Blaise Pascal’s proto-existentialist reflections, infinity is no longer plēroma but emptiness, a metaphysical void that all but invalidates any talk of final causes and thus denudes the material world of the logos previously taken to organize all things and manifest them as phenomena susceptible of progressively deepening experience.
What distinguishes the modern Weltbild from the Christian-Platonic logos is not just its strictly immanent character and its ongoing legitimation by an exclusively human quest for “clear and distinct” representations. Of equal (if more embarrassing) import is modernity’s acute bewilderment when confronted with ancient frameworks that seem increasingly unintelligible and illegible to its naturalist conception of knowledge. Put differently, “ancient” and “modern” do not so much identify competing frameworks as they are the flags flown by the proverbial two ships passing each other in the night. Thus it makes little sense to construe the ancient/modern divide as a momentous rupture within a single vector of historical progress extending confidently toward some utopian future; for such an explanation can only ever issue from within a modern perspective to begin with and thus begs the central question. What Heidegger’s portrait of modernity as the “age of the world picture” hints at but, given his ideological entanglements, fails to say outright is that modernity’s quest for capturing all present and future phenomena in causally determinative “representations” and aggregating them in a single, unifying Weltbild shows it to be absolutely committed to a strictly mimetic construction of the experiential world. The world may be captured as a totalizing image—that is, a comprehensive “system” of scientifically warranted and putatively “self-evident” propositions. Yet as a result, modernity’s dependency on the image risks deteriorating into an utter entrapment by some strictly immanent or naturalist frame. “Representation” (Vorstellung) becomes modernity’s version of the golden calf, and whatever cannot be assimilated and rendered legible within the specific terms of our modern Weltbild—and that includes above all earlier, so-called premodern frameworks—can also no longer be dialectically engaged.
In this regard, at least, modern and premodern constructions of the world truly are incommensurable; for prior to G. W. F. Hegel’s retrieval of dialectical thinking, modernity can only anathemize the foreign, unassimilable, and wholly other phenomenon, whereas ancient Platonic and early Christian frameworks seek to engage it dialectically. Hegel’s powerful critique of the Enlightenment’s struggle with superstition as de facto ensnared by the otherness that it takes itself to oppose had shown modernity’s major liability to be precisely this lack of dialectical thinking or genuine reflection. What derails the Enlightenment project is its unreflective, undialectical “struggle with otherness [als ihr Anderes]” and the categorical supposition that “what is not rational has not truth, or, what is not grasped conceptually, is not.”22 The quintessential age of the world picture, Enlightenment thinking is incapable of grasping truth as a movement—by which we mean not its appropriation by an isolated self, but the dialectical movement of an idea progressively clarified by the inadvertent miscarriage of that very attempt. Blind to any possible mediation of the intelligible with the foreign, the Enlightenment thus rejects and pathologizes per definitionem (i.e., as sheer superstition or as illegitimate, threatening otherness) all those phenomena that resist integration into value-neutral, conceptual idealities. Notably, that includes those qualia (feelings, beliefs, commitments, moral obligations, virtues, aspirations toward transcendence, etc.) whereby the individual is alerted to its a priori relatedness to others and to the world of phenomena at large. Not until Hegel’s generous tribute to Aristotle’s concept of entelechy in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology do we have a genuine attempt to overcome the exclusionary logic of modernity’s strictly propositional take on the world. The age of the “world picture” captures the world of phenomena by liquidating their specificity, their distinctive and incontrovertible valence and resonance as qualia within the human agent. Yet as a result, the Weltbild also confines the knower; as Wittgenstein was to put it, “a picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably.”23
A second implication of Heidegger’s thesis concerns modernity’s changed outlook on concepts and the uniquely human act of conceptual thinking. For Aquinas, whose oeuvre can justly be taken as the most comprehensive and lucid articulation of a premodern framework, “our experience of things is not a confrontation with something utterly alien, but a way of absorbing, and being absorbed by, the world to which we naturally belong. The mind does not primarily depict, reflect or mirror the world; rather, it assimilates the world as it is assimilated to the world.”24 Progressively estranged from this integrative and unified framework, to which we shall return in due course, post-Thomist thought appears increasingly preoccupied with explaining the discontinuity or seeming randomness of natural phenomena and human action. It thus begins to accord a far more prominent and, in time, near-exclusive role to efficient causation and in so doing recasts human cognition as a fundamentally pragmatic, instrumental endeavor.25 No longer do concepts function as vehicles for articulating the manifest structures of the logos and the character of our participation in it; instead, concepts are deployed, in contingent and occasional fashion, as mere tools for representing or “depicting” (very much in the sense of Heidegger’s Weltbild) isolated and fleeting phenomena or substantially alien “objects.” From here on, “one ‘knows’ only what one has built up from within. In [Robert] Lenoble’s pithy expression: ‘Connaître c’est fabriquer.’”26
To the extent that the world’s coherence as “cosmos” is no longer guaranteed but, on the contrary, is hypostatized as a system incessantly demanding further elaboration and verification, the function of modern concepts is no longer integrative but disjunctive. A particularly apt instance involves the shift from Pythagorean tuning, which “harmonizes the octave,” to Vincenzo Galilei’s rationalization of tuning, which partitions the scale into equal intervals. Where “the Pythagorean ratios of 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 and 9:8 . . . [had] enabled the inaudible sounds of the heavens to vibrate within the early soul, and, conversely, for the audible tones of human music to reflect the celestial spheres,” the modern, rationalized conception of equal temperament “collapsed music into ‘reality’ as an audible fact divorced from celestial values.”27 Descartes’s reasoning from God to the world reinforces what we shall find lurking in Ockham’s Quodlibetal Questions: meaning is no longer deemed intrinsic to experience, and knowledge is won only at the expense of its terminal divorce from any type of sensation. Given nominalism’s assertion of the utter incommensurability of God and creation, and given its insistence that “whatever is asserted must be asserted hypothetically with the theological recognition that it may be totally otherwise,” it cannot surprise that Descartes’s project of a mathesis universalis should eventually have stripped the senses of any evidentiary role.28 As early as in the writings of Ockham and in Nicholas of Autrecourt’s subsequent revival of atomism, concepts—rather than enabling us to articulate our participation in phenomena invested with unconditional reality and rationality—instead come to function referentially and predicatively; they serve to juxtapose discrete empirical objects “out there” to a hermetically enclosed observing consciousness, or cogito. Central to the modern epistemological stance is the axiom of a cogito permanently estranged from the phenomena with which it is engaged. Indeed, because it can engage them only on the premise of their radical heterogeneity, the “representational character” (Vorgestelltheit) of objective phenomena implies a strictly referential model wherein cognition and abstraction have become fully convertible. On a modern, post-Copernican understanding, to know is to render something visible as such, albeit in a medium (universal mathematics) essentially different from the phenomenon at hand and without making normative claims about either the phenomenon or its relation to the epistemological agent. Not only does such a model of cognition require the methodical cultivation of distance and detachment, but it also implies the neutrality, the indifference (perhaps even the outright incommensurability) of the knower and the known.
Often remarked upon, the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with visibility, with bringing “to light,” or making “plain” and “evident” knowledge in the here and now, also points to the changed function of narrative—whose authority now pivots on its emancipation from, not relation to, the past. Johann Gottfried Herder’s shrewd remark that “in our century we have, alas, so much light” points toward what Michael Polanyi has called the “separation of reason and experience” and the “attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world.”29 The beginnings of that shift may indeed date back as early as the Ionian school of Democritus for whom, contrary to Pythagoras, “numbers and geometrical forms were no longer assumed to be inherent as such in Nature.”30 And yet, in embracing a counterintuitive theory such as the one ventured by Copernicus, modern scientific inquiry abides in “the expectation of an indefinite range of possible future confirmations of the theory.” Moreover, it can only defer—yet never obviate or supplant—our return to what Husserl calls the “natural attitude” (natürliche Einstellung). That is, confirmation of a new theory cannot be strictly immanent to its own mathematical design but must eventually become intuitable; for “any critical verification of a scientific statement requires the same powers for recognizing rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery, even though it exercises these at a lower level.”31 In his 1910–1911 lectures, Husserl had drawn attention to this often obscured fact that “every natural science, insofar as it presupposes the theses of the natural world-perspective [natürliche Weltansicht] is a priori bound up with the ontology of the real [reale Ontologie].” Thus it “presupposes as valid what is prescribed for it in terms of the general sense of nature as a datum of experience.”32
Even as he approaches questions of method from a strictly scientific perspective, Michael Polanyi leaves no doubt that no method can ever be entirely self-certifying, but that it presupposes what Newman, speaking in a different context, had called “antecedent probability.” At stake here is the axiological priority of subsidiary over focal awareness, of “fore-meaning” (Vorhabe, Vorbedeutung) over intention. Any specific act of inquiry presupposes a subject’s teleological orientation vis-à-vis a particular “life-world” (Husserl’s Lebenswelt), a world whose sheer givenness alone enables us to conceive and articulate specific epistemic objectives. In Heidegger’s nomenclature, all Dasein involves a subsidiary “attunement” (Stimmung), an antecedent grasp of what is in light of what ought to be; Heidegger calls it “care” (Sorge). For a particular scientific method to have been conceived at all, let alone to have undergone purposive “application,” there has to be this subsidiary orientation—a non-transcendable “horizon” that can neither be unilaterally suspended nor objectively dissected by some particular methodology.33 Approaching the issue from the perspective of philosophical theology, rather than the hard sciences, the same point emerges no less forcefully in the recent work of Jean-Luc Marion. “Method,” Marion insists, “should not . . . secure indubitability in the mode of a possession of objects that are certain because produced according to the a priori conditions for knowledge. It should provoke the indubitability of the apparition of things, without producing the certainty of objects . . . The method does not run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore-seeing it, pre-dicting it, and pro-ducing it, in order to await it from the outset at the end of the path (meta-hodos) onto which it has just barely set forth.”34 Not only, then, is it “of the essence of the scientific method to select for verification hypotheses having a high chance of being true,” but the application of theoretical maxims or “rules of art” presupposes “a good deal of practical knowledge of the art. They derive their interest from our appreciation of the art and cannot themselves either replace or establish that appreciation.”35 Discussing the case of highly complex symmetries in crystals, Polanyi thus notes that our ability to identify an object of inquiry as apposite cannot itself be licensed by some theory but, instead, depends on an antecedent “aesthetic ideal, closely akin to that deeper and never rigidly definable sensibility by which the domains of art and art-criticism are governed.” The point emerges most clearly from the counterfactual scenario of utter randomness. The truly random is by definition unintelligible; it “can never produce a significant pattern” quite simply because its sole criterion involves “the absence of such a pattern.”36 Once order and knowledge, logos and cognition, have been understood as essentially convertible, it also becomes apparent that reason and structure can never simply be predicated of objects but must truly be found in them.
Put differently, reason is not some attribute of autonomously conceived, higher-level propositions about specific phenomena; rather, it informs how those phenomena themselves are apprehended to begin with. This is even (indeed especially) true where the initial stance is one of principled and thoroughgoing skepticism. As Husserl notes with regard to the Cartesian cogito, whenever “in our phenomenological attitude we are focused on a perception, we apprehend it as a completely immediate This!” There is no second-guessing of the phenomenon as such. To be sure, we may certainly suspect that “something only appears to have being” and consequently doubt “whether it really exists . . . Yet precisely thereupon, this appearing, this perceiving, remembering, judging, and so forth, are presupposed as given, just as they are indeed given [aber eben damit ist dieses Erscheinen, dieses Wahrnehmen, Erinnern, Urteile usf. als gegeben vorausgesetzt, wie es in der Tat gegeben ist].” As Husserl sums up the case (herein anticipating Marion’s recent reintegration of phenomenology with theology), “doubt presupposes the givenness, the indibutable givenness of the meaning that is posited in the doubt [Jedenfalls setzt also der Zweifel Gegebenheit voraus, die zweifellose Gegebenheit der Meinung, die in Zweifel gesetzt ist]. Consequently, this perception, this phenomenon of an abiding empirical givenness . . . is given absolutely.”37
If this is true of the hard sciences, it is eminently more true yet of the interpretive sciences which—to the extent that they have recently sought to emulate a strictly procedural concept of inquiry—have not only misconstrued their own mission and object but, as it turns out, also distorted the idea of scientific method. “To the extent to which our intelligence falls short of the idea of precise formalization,” Polanyi remarks, “we act and see by the light of unspecifiable knowledge and must acknowledge that we accept the verdict of our personal appraisal.” In other words, the authority of a specific method of knowing inevitably rests on, and is circumscribed by, the art of judgment—a term that, not coincidentally, we shall also find to be uniquely enmeshed with concepts of will and person. While obviously a crucial and indispensable tool for cognition and its communication, no method can ever be entirely self-authorizing. It rests on a “view” or judgment that, however provisionally and tenuously, charts the course for a given method’s progressive application.
It is in this, by definition pre-theoretical domain that the primacy of practical over theoretical (or speculative) reason reveals itself, and along with it the indispensable role of tradition. For at the moment of “application” we encounter “the principle of all traditionalism that practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”38 If our engagement with concepts is to be responsible and capacious, it cannot simply unfold in quasi-nominalist, over-focused fashion on their pragmatic use as seemingly neutral tools that fortuitously happen to be at hand. Michael Buckley’s distinction between four conceptions of method, while helpful, needs to be amended here. Only two of the methodologies that he identifies, the operational and the logistic, are truly methods in the modern sense of being “applied” to objects or phenomena held to be distinct from (and unrelated to) the agent of knowledge. The other two, the dialectical and the problematic methods, are not properly concerned with objects but with entire “conceptions” of knowledge; their concern lies not with some local object or phenomenon but with a historically conditioned discursive formation. This is true of the “problematic” method of Aristotle and Aquinas, particularly the latter’s method of disputatio, which progresses toward knowledge by staging a rigorous contest between the strongest versions of competing arguments. Likewise, Platonic and Hegelian dialectics constitute a second-level, as it were meta-discursive operation, and the strength of both—indeed, their inherent superiority over the other two—pivots on their showing knowledge to be a movement, a teleological progression. That crucial implication can already be located in the etymology of method (from Greek μέθοδος = a way, road, journey), which carries with it a strong narrative dimension, and as such is not focused on the application of a specific procedure but on the transformation of the agent of knowledge. Contrary to its fleeting and misleading association with “hunting” and sexual conquest—which, tellingly, is only suggested by the stranger in Plato’s Sophist (218d)—the dominant meaning is that of “a pilgrimage to the presence of a goddess.”39
In taking up the question “What Is a Concept, and How Do We Focus on It?” Robert Sokolowski emphasizes that concepts do not “represent” or “depict” objects but enable us “to focus on the thing in its intelligibility.” As he adds, it is better “to say ‘the thing in its intelligibility’ than ‘the thing and its intelligibility,’ because the latter suggests that the intelligibility and the thing are two different ‘entities,’” when in fact “the thing subsists only by being intelligible . . . It wouldn’t be what it is without it, and it wouldn’t be without it.”40 The last point will prove crucial to the historical exploration of the concepts of will and person, for it underscores that the object of inquiry—and indeed the idea of human agency adumbrated by these concepts—is inseparable from the sustained interpretive effort by which it is gradually distilled and articulated. In short, object and concept (Hegel’s Gegenstand and Begriff) are not related referentially, as word and object, but instead are mutually constitutive. The structure of concepts thus mirrors what Gadamer characterizes as “the ontological structure of understanding [Verstehen].” That is, a philosophically reflective and responsible engagement with concepts aims “not to develop a procedure of understanding, but to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place.” When approached as historically grown frameworks at once complex and dynamic, our conceptions never serve to produce knowledge ex nihilo but, instead, facilitate our encounter with what Husserl had called the world’s radical and indisputable anteriority, or its “absolute givenness.”41 Within the domain of humanistic inquiry at least, to work with concepts thus means to enter into an ethical—as opposed to a straightforward pragmatic—relation to the reality that these concepts prima facie allow us to apprehend and, in so doing, to acknowledge the rich and often agonistic history of uses to which they have been put in the past. Our relationship to concepts thus should mirror that to other persons; that is, it ought to rest “not on the subjection and abdication of reason but on an act of acknowledgment and knowledge.” Hence, whatever intellectual authority concepts possess “cannot actually be bestowed but is earned, and must be earned if someone is to lay claim to it. It rests on acknowledgment and hence on an act of reason itself.”42 For that to happen, and for us to inhabit concepts as living frameworks with a deep history, rather than occasionally wielding them as tools (such as resonates in the sadly common phrase of “applying a theory”) also means to conceive rationality not as a correlate of self-possession but of what, echoing Hegel, Gadamer calls “recognition” (Anerkennung). At issue here is a sustained, deliberative, and potentially creative reflection on the “antecedent probability” of a concept’s truth value along the lines explored by John Henry Newman in his Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and further scrutinized in his Grammar of Assent (1870).
To take that view also means to recognize that the intelligibility of our conceptions is never simply achieved by us as individual agents of knowledge, but that it pivots on our dialectical engagement of intellectual traditions—viz., the complex record of others’ articulations of those very concepts. Only so does their intentional correlate—what Hegel calls die Sache selbst (a notably more apposite term than “object”)—disclose itself as the focal point of a jointly cultivated awareness. Not coincidentally, the antagonism between knowledge as a shared and participatory process, and knowledge as commodity and capital—a conflict long in the making—has of late erupted into full view, such as in the current legal contestation of the fair use clause in international copyright law, particularly as it applies to academic instruction.43 Such legal disputes over the economic disposition of knowledge are but an inevitable entailment of modernity’s gradual redefinition of knowledge as a state of hermetic, “inner” certitude and, thus, as an object of possession rather than a phenomenon of disclosure. Humanistic inquiry, if it is to remain a meaning-generating (sinnstiftend) undertaking, would be especially ill advised to borrow reductionist models from the sciences, no matter how vexed its current practitioners may be by the humanities’ supposedly inferior (because less “rigorous”) public image.
In fact, humanistic inquiry not only cannot succeed but will positively vitiate its raison d’être if it deploys concepts on a purely occasional basis, viz., as tools to pry open the resistant casing of some putatively alien object or text.44 Within humanistic inquiry, concepts are received and inflected as we attempt to respond to questions we have inherited (not conceived ab novo); and to these questions we can only respond as a community of ethical beings whose responsibility extends both synchronically to our fellow beings and diachronically to the history of earlier respondents and to future generations who will inherit a world shaped by the values and commitments of our practical reason in the here and now. Far from the totalitarian specter or metaphysical menace as which it is commonly portrayed at present, normativity is simply the ethical framework (Newman calls it “implicit reason”) absent which intellectual work would be nothing more than a type of professionalized curiosity—that is, mere transaction rather than bona fide action. Both will and person, the terms most central to this study, can only signify if we recognize them as intrinsically normative. Throughout their complex and often conflicted hermeneutic history, they are deployed as imperfect articulations of a good, of a value or ethical ideal to the realization of which we take ourselves to be committed (notwithstanding our inevitable lapses in honoring that commitment); and their true province is that of practical reason, not theoretical speculation. For value concepts, as Robert Spaemann has pointed out, cannot be understood independently of their historical evolution and transmission; rather “to make their meaning understood we must again tell a story; but this time it is not the story of the referent, but of the term itself.”45 They do not have a referent vis-à-vis which their truth-content or “correctness” could be objectively verified. Rather, they are linchpins of our hermeneutic situation within a “process of tradition” (Überlieferungsgeschehen) of the kind that Gadamer, MacIntyre, et al. have affirmed, quite self-consciously, against modernity.
Following similar arguments by Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the present study’s principal concern lies with modernity’s apparent inability to grasp this trans-generational, hermeneutic dimension intrinsic to conceptual activity within the humanities. Within the interpretive disciplines, I argue, concepts ought to be engaged as hermeneutic frameworks, not as tools but as prima facie objects of inquiry; and their elusive perfection and authority cannot be separated from the trajectory of their previous applications or “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte), which in turn circumscribes, focuses, and indeed motivates our engagement with these concepts. As Gadamer had worked out with much care, “interpretation [Auslegung] is not an occasional, post facto supplement to understanding [Verstehen]; rather, understanding is always interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding.” Concepts thus do not serve to “decode” a text or set of phenomena ostensibly unrelated to us and only of objective or, as the case may be, historical interest. Rather, our reliance on concepts in humanistic, interpretive practice reflects the bilateral nature of all understanding as a process that “always involves something like applying [Anwendung] the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation.”46 Concepts thus disclose or unveil something; as Sokolowski argues, they draw out the intelligibility of the thing, its immanent essence and perfection, and they do so not merely to satisfy a questioner’s professional curiosity but, crucially, to articulate the knowledge so produced for another. Humanistic concepts, that is, acquire reality only within a shared hermeneutic space—a domain that, as remains to be seen, cannot be thought of in isolation from the evolving history of its guiding conceptions.
In his late work, Husserl took up what he had come to regard as a perilously limiting and abstract understanding of concepts, at once prone to estrange modern man from the reality of his “prescientific” experience and as modernity’s dangerous illusion of their supposedly neutral and objective “application.” While there certainly is an indispensable element of “correctness” to the way concepts function, he insists that their truth value is by no means exhausted in it.47 For there is also what Husserl calls the “truth of disclosure,” which is no longer concerned with the utility-function of concepts in a proposition but with their reflective evaluation as modes of “disclosing” the intrinsic logic of a thing for others. Hence, to know or understand something necessarily involves more than a strictly factual, detached, and value-neutral pronouncement about the object at hand. In fact, the very supposition of a thing’s “intelligibility” is intimately entwined with what Sokolowski calls “the goodness or perfection of those things. We never work with things simply as they are; we always see and understand them against the background of what they can be and what they should be.” There is an important temporal dimension to knowledge, in that it would be redundant to content ourselves with conceptualizing objects merely as they happen to be in the here and now. In fact, “the thing is not just what it is at the given moment in which we come to name it,” but it is a correlate of our intentional and conceptual activity precisely because it is susceptible of transformation, either from within or from without: “Only ends bring out the full intelligibility of things.”48
1. Academic Postmodern, 7.
2. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, esp. 19–63 and 126–148.
3. De Man, “Resistance to Theory,” 20.
4. Eagleton, Illusions, 5; Simpson, Academic Postmodern, 26.
5. Tallis, “Suicide of the Humanities.”
6. “I can never . . . affect a style which an ancient critic would have deemed purposely invented for persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for those to comprehend who labour under the more pitiable asthma of a short-witted intellect” (CF, 1:20).
7. On this distinction, see C. Taylor, who notes that contrary to modern, “single-term moralities” that “offer us a homogenous, calculable domain of moral considerations” and in their “caculability fit with the dominant models of disengaged reason,” a truly capacious ethic “involves more than what we are obligated to do. It also involves what it is good to be” (Dilemmas and Connections, 6–9); see also Murdoch’s insistence on “goodness” as holding axiological priority over rational choice, and as furnishing “a permanent background to human activity.” Her pivotal question—“are there any techniques for the purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish, in such a way that when moments of choice arrive we shall be sure of acting rightly?” (Sovereignty, 52–53)—had arguably been answered, albeit by a tradition of thinkers whom Murdoch instinctively avoids; for the question goes to the heart of why and for what end human beings ought to cultivate habits and virtues; on the issue of habituation in Aquinas, and contrasted to modern behaviorism, see below 360–369.
8. Eagleton, Illusions, 46.
9. Buckley, Origins, 336.
10. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 556.
11. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 40.
12. Husserl, Crisis, esp. §9 on Galileo’s and Descartes’s mathematization and quantitative transformation of nature; Gaukroger, Emergence, 400–451; Dupré, Passage, 42–64; Buckley, Origins, 68–85; on the correlated migration of the attribute of infinity from a “fulfilling dignity” to a mere “predicate of indefiniteness,” see Blumenberg, LMA, 77–87.
13. Husserl, Crisis, 8–9; see also E. Cassirer, Erkenntnisproblem, 1:442–482; Dupré, Passage, 65–91; Gaukroger, Emergence, 159–195; Pippin, Modernism, 22–25; and M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 3–65.
14. Quoted in Dupré, Passage, 68.
15. Husserl, Crisis, 9; trans. modified.
16. Unintended Reformation, 184, 205.
17. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 48, 64. Woven into Weber’s pluralism is a profoundly agonistic view of human life as “essentially an inescapable conflict” (ibid., 65). In tracing the implicit theology of Weber—a bowdlerized Calvinism in which the drive toward peace and salvation is firmly planted in the human individual, even as the means for its attainment have been withheld—Strauss draws attention to the Machiavellian and Nietzschean assumptions from which Weber’s sociology proceeds, yet which themselves never came under scrutiny: “Weber, who wrote thousands of pages, devoted hardly more than thirty of them to a thematic discussion of the basis of his whole position. Why was that basis so little in need of proof? Why was it self-evident to him?” (ibid., 64).
18. Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” 86; Eng. Question Concerning Technology, 129.
19. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 129–130 (trans. modified). Ger. “Weltbild, wesentlich verstanden, meint daher nicht ein Bild von der Welt, sondern die Welt als Bild begriffen. Das Seiende im Ganzen wird jetzt so genommen, daß es erst und nur seiend ist, sofern es durch den vorstellend-herstellenden Menschen gestellt ist. Wo es zum Weltbild kommt, vollzieht sich eine wesentliche Entscheidung über das Seiende im Ganzen. Das Sein des Seienden wird in der Vorgestelltheit des Seienden gesucht und gefunden. Überall dort aber, wo das Seiende nicht in diesem Sinne ausgelegt wird, kann auch die Welt nicht ins Bild rücken, kann es kein Weltbild geben. Daß das Seiende in der Vorgestelltheit seiend wird, macht das Zeitalter, in dem es dahin kommt, zu einem neuen gegenüber dem vorigen. Die Redewendung ‘Weltbild der Neuzeit’ und ‘neuzeitliches Weltbild’ sagen zweimal dasselbe und unterstellen etwas, was es nie zuvor geben konnte, nämlich ein mittelalterliches und ein antikes Weltbild. Das Weltbild wird nicht von einem vormals mittelalterlichen zu einem neuzeitlichen, sondern dies, daß überhaupt die Welt zum Bild wird, zeichnet das Wesen der Neuzeit aus” (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” 87–88).
20. Dupré, Passage, 167–189.
21. Buckley, Origins, 97.
22. The Enlightenment’s “notion [Begriff] is all essentiality and there is nothing outside of it . . . As insight, therefore, it becomes the negative of pure insight, becomes untruth and unreason [Unwahrheit und Unvernunft] . . . It entangles itself in this contradiction through engaging in dispute, and imagines that what it is attacking is something other than itself [etwas Anderes zu bekämpfen meint]. It only imagines this, for its essence as absolute negativity implies that it contains that otherness within itself” (PS, 332–333/PG, 388–389); on this momentous chapter in the Phenomenology, and on the Enlightenment’s implicit evolution of “utility” as a new gold standard of truth, allegedly supplanting emotivist conceptions of faith, see Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 165–180.
23. Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen. Und heraus konnten wir nicht, denn es lag in unserer Sprache, und sie schien es uns nur unerbittlich zu wiederholen” (Philosophical Investigations, 53 [§115]); see also C. Taylor’s discussion of the “immanent frame” (Secular Age, 539–593).
24. Kerr, After Aquinas, 31; see also Hyman, Short History, 47–66, and Blumenberg, LMA, 325–337.
25. Quoting David Braine, Kerr notes that “whereas our ordinary workaday pre-philosophical concept of causing is occluded by the model of the interaction of impersonal forces, . . . the much older and richer premodern conception of irreducibly distinctive modes of agency ‘has been lost sight of or repudiated in an attempt to reduce all agency to the material or mechanical model, or to mysterious mentalistic variants of this’” (After Aquinas, 47).
26. Dupré, Passage, 66.
27. Chua, Absolute Music, 15, 18. As he sums up his case: “ancient rationality unifies; modernity divides” (20).
28. Confronting the mutation of rationalism “from a comprehensive natural theology to a comprehensive skepticism” and “the progressive temptation of the intellect to destroy itself first by overweening pretensions and then by ineluctable disappointment,” Descartes’s preoccupation with certitude—and his emphatic dissociation of such certitude from the testimony of the senses—seems inevitable (Buckley, Origins, 74, 70, 72).
29. Herder, quoted in Dupré, Enlightenment, 219; M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 3.
30. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 8–9.
31. Ibid., 5, 13.
32. Husserl, Basic Problems, 24.
33. Nietzsche’s famous depiction of a secular modernity that has “wiped away the entire horizon” (Wer gab uns den Schwamm, um den ganzen Horizont wegzuwischen?) foreshadows Husserl’s and Gadamer’s subsequent use of the same trope (Gay Science, §125; p. 120).
34. Being Given, 9.
35. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 30–31.
36. Ibid., 48, 37. “Any numerical assessment of the probability that a certain event has occurred by chance can be made only with a view to the alternative possibility of its being governed by a particular pattern of orderliness” (ibid., 33).
37. Husserl, Basic Problems, 54–55 (§24).
38. Ibid., 54. Polanyi’s subsequent distinction between subsidiary and focal awareness, wholes and meanings, tools and frameworks, and his emphasis on the indelible role of “commitment” in focused inquiry (55–65) reveals his intellectual proximity to modern phenomenology, arguably the most capable philosophical stance from which to rethink modernity as a problem without eo ipso being ensnared in its conceptual and ideological premises.
39. Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, quoted in Buckley, Origins, 22.
40. Phenomenology of the Human Person, 177.
41. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295; Husserl, Basic Problems, 54.
42. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 281.
43. A striking example is the case of Georgia State University, sued by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publishers, over its facilitation of electronic course readings. On the initial suit, see “Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter” (NY Times, 16 April 2008 www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/technology/16school.html); the case was decided in favor of the defendant, Georgia State University, in August 2012. On the perils of treating knowledge as private property and asserting exclusive ownership over it—and thus perverting intelligibilia into sensibilia, verities into consumables—see Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, esp. 154–159.
44. “The human sciences cannot be adequately described in terms of this conception of research and progress, . . . [because] what the[y] share with the natural is only a subordinate element of the work done in the human sciences” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 284).
45. Persons, 17.
46. Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 306–307. Gadamer’s point is (surprisingly) echoed by Jameson, who notes that “what passes for modernity . . . is itself little more than the projection of its own rhetorical structure onto the themes and content in question: the theory of modernity is little more than a projection of the trope itself” (Singular Modernity, 34; see also 94).
47. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 120–127 (§§44–45).
48. Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 186–188.