FORGETTING BY REMEMBERING
Historicism and the Limits of Modern Knowledge
To return once more to Heidegger’s notion of the modern Weltbild, it appears that yet another change wrought by the age of the “world picture” concerns a thoroughgoing shift in the form, function, and scope of narrative. The structure of narrative mutates from the mnemonic to the emancipatory, from the genre of epic to that of utopia, and from an evolving, deepening, and transformative engagement with received concepts and meanings to the methodical cultivation of a detached and critically objectifying stance whose principal concern lies with overcoming the past. Developing their critique of modernity from diametrically opposed points of view, both Schopenhauer and Coleridge recognize that what impels and legitimates modernity’s changed concept of narrative is a deep-seated fear of error, be it as a result of the constant possibility of deception perpetrated by Descartes’s specter of a dieu trompeur or because of our supposed propensity to become mired in the past, a habit that for Descartes spells mere stasis and mindless repetition; hence modernity’s preoccupation with both remembering and overcoming the past, which accounts for the modern era’s simultaneous cultivation of vigilance and forgetfulness. To fend off this perceived threat of the past as sheer recurrence, modern narrative unfolds as a utopian quest for a radically autonomous and entrepreneurial model of agency—one that produces and consumes both its own conceptual inventory and those social, moral, economic, and political meanings to whose construction that inventory is deemed uniquely conducive. Defining of modern “progress,” Hans Blumenberg notes, is “the continuous self-justification of the present, by means of the future that it gives itself, before the past, with which it compares itself” (LMA, 32).
While some of these issues will be taken up more fully at the beginning of Part IV, it is necessary to identify more precisely the kind of narrative of modernity that is being presented in what follows and, in particular, how it differs from a by now fairly established model of intellectual history or some such historicist survey that aspires to (or presumes outright) the essential “pastness” of the past and its merely archival interest for the present. Neither the historical evolution of the concept of the will nor that of the person admits of being treated as some kind of prehistory, be it in the spirit of our having overcome its alleged inadequacies or finding ourselves as the putative telos of the trajectory of either idea as it migrates from Greek philosophy into the modern era. If, then, modern narrative conceives (by default, as it were) the past in essentially historicist form—viz., as something concluded, alien, and incommensurable with present and future exigencies—it is also true that modernity has proven a fertile ground for the production of a very different kind of narrative. The basic impetus and objective pursued in modern narrative is a notion of the event as essentially unprecedented and singular, that is, a novum or, indeed, a “novel.” Not only must modernity find forever new ways to impress on us the sublimity of its very occurrence, but it must simultaneously cut from whole cloth the intellectual template whereby this event is to become intelligible for us. One of the first “discoveries” of the modern era—and structurally cognate with the emergence of Heidegger’s Weltbild—thus involves the proposition that the past is a historical object, deemed intelligible because (and only insofar as) it has definitively expired and thus no longer constrains our self-awareness. If, as Heidegger concludes, “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” (Der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt als Bild), its Achilles heel will be a one-sided conception of narrative as a strictly archeological endeavor concerned with preserving, and thus containing, what is peremptorily construed as other.1 Under conditions of modernity, all history is merely prehistory.
Staging a curious version of Sigmund Freud’s fort/da game, modernity thus compensates for its original dilemma by simultaneously engaging with and disengaging from the past. It invents the notion of a “past” as strictly passé, as archival, fossilized (“sedimented”), and inert stuff. Already the etymology of modernus (first attested around A.D. 500) shows the word denoting less a particular span of time than a fundamentally changed perspective on temporality itself. Derived from modo (Lat., only, merely, just), a word that also means “lately” and carries a strong association with the present, modernus is “one of the last legacies of vulgar Latin” among related temporal terms, the only one to perform “the exclusive function of designating the historical now of the present.”2 What defines the modern is less the idea of novelty and the “new” than a present viewed in sharp contrast with what was formerly held to be of timeless validity. Gradually establishing itself in contradistinction to antiquitas, the “modern” rejects the notion of the distant past as a reservoir of exemplary meanings: “The twelfth century moderni’s experience of time is . . . typological, not cyclical. Typology takes moments separated in time and relates them to one another as the intensification of the old in the new. The new preserves the old; the old lives on in the new. The old is redeemed in the new, and the new is built on the foundation of the old.”3
An analogous history characterizes the increasingly prominent role of the words “secular” and “epoch” in the early modern era, though there is no space to trace it here. In each case, a concept seemingly designating a particular span of recent time introduces the postclassical notion of time as a linear progression or sequence that no longer sees the past as having an enduring and indispensable “presence” within our ongoing quest for rational orientation. Instead, modernity’s dominant conception of time is one of chronometric and value-neutral accountancy, a series of discrete and fungible epochs occasionally punctuated by threshold moments or “hot chronologies” (1648, 1707, 1789, 1815, 1848, etc.).4 Both this computational model of time and the partitioned conception of epochs that it helped spawn rest on one crucial, albeit unexamined assumption: that neither time nor history is to be credited with meaning, that both are categorically devoid of “plenitude” in the strong neo-Platonic and eschatological sense of parousia (fulfillment, presence). In their linear and monochrome progression, concepts such as “modern,” “secular,” and “epoch” thus institute estrangement and loss as the affective signature of human experience since the late Middle Ages. What has vanished is what Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” so painstakingly seeks to recover: viz., the persistence of time in consciousness.5 As remains to be seen, the dismantling of time into heterogeneous, incessantly “lapsing” units of measurement correlates with the (in origin nominalist) dissolution of the person into a series of states whose connectivity Locke is only prepared to accept as a hypothesis in urgent need of the kind of “demonstration” that Hume with good reason eventually declared to be impossible. At the same time, ever watchful that the past might not be sufficiently dead but might inopportunely rise again—not as a truly living presence, to be sure, but as the “undead” of the modern Gothic imagination—modernity spawns an entirely new discipline aimed to ensure that this will not happen. It is called historicism.
To characterize modernity’s outlook on intellectual genealogies and traditions as one of amnesia is to suppose, minimally, that what has taken place is not a radical, terminal “forgetting” but, rather, a prolonged failure to remember—with the proviso that “remembering” here means engaging the history of an idea or conception in such a way as to recognize ourselves to be implicated in it. In a post-historicist account of the kind here attempted, remembering thus entails less the past’s possession by than its dialectical transformation of the subject. While this failure to recognize history as a genuinely interpretive process ought to be seen as self-inflicted, it should not be construed as a case of “repression” of the standard Freudian variety. For it is not that the content of a given idea or conception—its “topicality” (Freud’s Besetzung)—is being repressed. Rather, we will find that how we apprehend and relate to conceptions and ideas has been decisively altered and, in part, become deeply confused. To be sure, the content and thematic scope of conceptions, particularly those inherited from the premodern era, undergoes much scrutiny as the modern project of critique develops an ambitious, explicit, and often iconoclastic outlook on that past. That much is readily apparent when considering William of Ockham’s rejection of Aquinas’s ontology of a timeless and uncreated divine logos or Hobbes’s assault on free agency, self-awareness, and Aristotelian, teleological models of human flourishing.
Yet what is being elided in modernity’s methodical elaboration of a critical perspective on past frameworks and ideas is a fuller understanding of how ideas and conceptions actually develop over time—viz., as a long, if uneven dialectical progression. Indeed, it is only by tracing their evolution over time, rather than by seizing on their specific meaning at any given historical moment, that we are able to grasp the reality, significance, and truth value of ideas. What Michael Buckley has shown to characterize modern conceptions of atheism, viz., that its central terms “function more like variables than like constants in intellectual history,” also holds true for the conceptions of “will,” “judgment,” and “person” throughout this study.6 Seneca’s caveat—“If ever you want to find out what a thing really is, entrust it to time”—thus stands in stark contrast to modernity’s impatience with contemplative forms of knowing and, as Hobbes so supremely exemplifies, its axiomatic view of knowledge as a type of property supposedly freed from the interpretive contingency said to vitiate human expression, belief, and inner certitude.7
A major impediment to achieving a comprehensive grasp of our historical situation (inasmuch as such attempts are undertaken from within the humanities at all anymore) has to do with the fact that in describing historical processes and interpreting specific aesthetic forms we tend to rely almost without thinking on a vocabulary of breaks, ruptures, and caesurae, and a nomenclature of “epochs.” Yet to understand modernity simply by looking for discontinuities of the kind so loudly asserted by its intellectual progenitors surely amounts to a case of the “imitative fallacy” and as such begs the question of modernity on a grand scale. For it fails to consider the alternative possibility, viz., that concepts—far from being mere “tools” or heuristic devices—acquire legitimacy and meaning within the human sciences only by virtue of their complex history of transmission and their gradual elucidation of an underlying idea. To be sure, the claim here is not that there are no breaks or that the very idea of modernity as somehow constituting (or instituting) a break with the very idea of “tradition” is false. Rather, we must learn to disentangle the performative character of modernity’s self-descriptions—which tend to create the intellectual discontinuities that they purport to have uncovered in the form of past “error”—from their truth value. Among the more powerful arguments to that effect, Gadamer’s view of understanding as the “immersion in a process of tradition” and Blumenberg’s reading of modernity as the unwitting “reoccupation” of the ancient and intractable legacy of Gnosticism stand out, and both will at various turns inform the arguments that follow. Yet the principal emphasis of this book is rather different. To read against the grain of those self-certifying, “epoch-making” accounts that modernity has periodically proffered (William of Ockham, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Kant) is to become aware of a pervasive, if often nearly imperceptible weakening of basic concepts that had been central to humanistic inquiry since Plato and Pythagoras. Modernity’s fading awareness of the deep histories circumscribing these concepts stems from a changed idea of the very act of “conceptualization” itself. Beginning with Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes, the focus now is on the sheer efficacy of political, social, and economic reasoning. Rather than being understood as outgrowths of histories and traditions that ought to be reflexively engaged, concepts come to be appraised instrumentally. The focus now is on their methodological tidiness and their demonstrable fitness for achieving a specific quantifiable “objective” to whose pursuit we are committed beforehand.
In focusing on “will” and “person,” this study seeks to tabulate the costs of modernity’s principled and “progressive” forgetting of what I take to be an elemental aspect of all ideas and conceptions related to the human: viz., that they achieve meaning only within the long durée of historical time, and that their value and import is not secured by a singular, interventionist act of definition but by our steadily deepening interpretive engagement with their historical transmission and development. Yet precisely this outlook was short-circuited by a modernity whose self-image as a decisive break and “unprecedented” epoch implied a fundamentally altered notion of progressive, secular time conceived in chronometric and equivalent, rather than rhythmic and epiphanic, terms. This story, to be considered here only briefly, has been told from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints, albeit with sharply divergent emphasis. We know it as Schiller’s “wound upon modern humanity” inflicted by “culture,” Hegel’s unhappy consciousness propelled into self-awareness by the “self-movement of the concept” (Selbstbewegung des Begriffs), Max Weber’s “disenchantment” (Entzauberung der Welt), Karl Polanyi’s “Great Transformation,” Heidegger’s “loss of the gods” (Entgötterung), Michael Buckley’s “self-alienation of religion,” Hannah Arendt’s displacement of “action” by “behavior,” and Michel Foucault’s emergent regime of systemic disciplinary and discursive formations. Alternatively, the shift has also been conceptualized, by Hans Blumenberg, as modernity’s “second overcoming of Gnosticism” and, more recently, by Anthony Giddens, Louis Dupré, Marcel Gauchet, and Charles Taylor as variously inflected narratives of secularization or the “great disembedding” paradoxically ushered in by post-Scholastic Christianity and, eventually, by Protestantism’s insistence on a human-engineered, individualistic salvation.8
Given modernity’s self-description as an “epoch” unlike any other, any engagement with its intellectual legacy must be on guard against merely reenacting its avowed discontinuities. In arguing that humanistic inquiry depends on a sustained and reflective grasp of conceptual histories, the following exploration of will and person (and their shifting affiliation with notions of judgment, responsibility, and self-awareness) suspends the distinctively modern antithesis between a sublime, apocalyptic model of historical time and a blandly chronometric model, as they have variously been realized in “decline-and-fall” and “rise-and-progress” narratives of modernity. Instead, the following critical readings of some pivotal texts and voices seeking either to give fuller articulation to or to dismantle basic concepts of humanistic inquiry locates the meaning of historical time in these articulations. In so doing, the present argument stages a dialectical conversation between a Christian-Platonist tradition, broadly conceived, and a naturalist-reductionist tradition that spans from the Greek atomists to David Hume and his contemporary, neuro-scientific descendants. Instead of a narrative of progress or decline homogenizing the intellectual contents wherein the ebb and flow of historical time become prima facie legible, what follows is an attempt to trace two basic ways of inhabiting historical time, one hermeneutic and the other methodical in kind. If the latter tends to draw on a utopian or dystopic conception of time (rise-and-progress/decline-and-fall), the hermeneutic model conceives of ideas and concepts as continuously evolving realizations of a truth—as opposed to a mere aggregate of propositions—taken to have informed the concepts in question from their very beginning. Its purest form, and one to which this study is openly committed, is to be found in Platonic anamnēsis, itself subject to intricate modern re-articulations in. Hegel’s phenomenology, Newman’s theory of development, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.
Where concepts are grasped as conduits for the successive distillation of a truth, rather than as propositions contingently advanced by (putatively) autonomous selves, time is liable to be experienced as epiphanic rather than linear in nature. Its phenomenology is one of sudden disclosure, as opposed to the flat-line temporality that characterizes modernity’s procedural and methodological self-portrayal as an age of “progress,” one that with inexorable logic gave rise to and, in turn, was sanctioned as “necessary” by the modern discipline of sociology from Auguste Comte to Max Weber. It bears recalling here that, as conceived in the “enchanted” world of ancient myth (Egyptian, Greek, and early Roman), time was experienced and conceived as cyclical, recurrent, and inherently rhythmic—something memorably captured in the elegiac, if also unabashedly belletristic opening of Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). In a less mournful idiom, Charles Taylor maps the differentiated, premodern conception of time involving ordinary, quotidian time, the “higher time” realized in sacred ritual and sacramental practice, and two models of eternity—the nunc stans to “which we aspire by rising out of time; and God’s eternity, which doesn’t abolish time, but gathers it into an instant.”9 With greater emphasis on critical method, Erich Auerbach extends Huizinga’s vivid portrayal of late medieval time as sharply accented and internally differentiated, and of quotidian life punctured by moments of heightened spiritual significance. Thus he notes how the established, typological reading of “an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac” (viz., as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ) conceives a relation “between two events . . . linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension.” Their simultaneity is not defined temporally but, in fact, “can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence . . . [Thus] the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and will be fulfilled in the future.” Benedict Anderson reaffirms Auerbach’s sense that such a conception of time cradled by eternity, divine providence, and hence a simultaneity that has nothing to do with mere “coincidence” or “chance” is deeply alien to us today.10
Beginning in the seventeenth century and culminating in Hobbes, the modern “idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” gradually displaces the older model. For Anthony Giddens, this shift coincides with “the separation of time from space” and the consequent emergence of a “radical historicity” that “depends upon modes of ‘insert’ into time and space unavailable to previous civilizations.”11 Speaking of the “complex” experience of time that prevailed for the first thousand years of Christianity, Charles Taylor notes that aside from the “secular time of ordinary ‘temporal’ existence, in which things happen one after another in an even rhythm, there was . . . Platonic eternity,” as well as the “eternity of God, where he stands contemporary with the whole flow of history.” Finally, there was “a higher time of original founding events, which we can periodically re-approach at certain high moments,” that is, in religious ritual. As J. G. A. Pocock has persuasively argued, it is in Hobbes that this model of time as a strictly transcendent and self-sufficient framework begins to break down; modern thought initially faces the theoretical challenge of defining the apparent coexistence of two models of time, a monotheistic concept of time intelligible only in relation to “divine actions and utterances” and “a rich texture of the acts, words and thoughts of personal and social beings” for which empirically “observable continuities, recurrences, and occurrences” could no longer be axiomatically thought “vertically” but, instead, had to be “recast . . . in terms of process, change and discontinuity.”12
Here, then, lie the origins of Walter Benjamin’s much-quoted characterization of modern time as “homogeneous [and] empty.” Benjamin faults nineteenth-century historicism for ignoring the distinction between historical and messianic time and contenting itself with a flat-line notion of history as nothing more than “a causal connection between various moments.” Yet to string up “a sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” fails to recognize that what converts a mere fact into an explanatory cause cannot itself be historical; facts only become “historical posthumously.” For Benjamin, historicist knowledge is de facto impossible unless supplemented by a complex, speculative, and eschatological (as opposed to a strictly chronometric) conception of time, which alone (given the right “constellation” of inquiry) may reveal how the void of our present “is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”13 In their gnomic rejection of historicism, however, Benjamin’s Theses on the Concept of History implicitly concede modernity’s dominant conception of time as chronometric, homogeneous, and inexorably forward-moving. Indeed, nineteenth-century historicism is merely the most conspicuous instance of modernity’s acquiescence in the downward transposition of time from a dynamic trajectory punctuated by epiphanic intensities into a mere unit of measurement. Thus modernity’s methodically constructed “world picture” (to recall Heidegger’s apt phrase) as it emerges from the canonical writings of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz for the most part understands time as merely “lapsing” and incessantly receding into a “past” now conceived as history—a vast inventory of essentially equivalent or, rather, indifferent and disaggregated, nominal “facts” awaiting their opportunistic retrieval as evidence in some explanatory scheme shaped by present exigencies.
Inasmuch as modernity—at least prior to the crucial revaluations of Hegel, Coleridge, and Newman—understands time only ever as lapsing and expiring—and hence as incapable of realizing or fulfilling antecedent meanings—its figuration of time as inherently historical also carries with it a strong, if often unacknowledged implication of loss. The price paid for embracing a model of time that with uniform dullness extends forward into an endlessly hypostatized future is the psychopathology of what Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, calls a “distracted universe”—a continually nagging, albeit inarticulate expectancy, and an alternately passive (consumerist) or hyperactive (mindless) hunger for the “nothing new.” Meanwhile, what does happen, and what this book seeks to chart in some detail, is a persistent forgetting of the past that had once saturated our conceptual frameworks and the intricate translation and reinterpretation of the ideas comprised by them across various cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Unlike mythical time, modern temporality and history not only can never recur but can only ever be experienced as “passing” into oblivion or as the anxious projection of an uncertain future. As Gadamer saw so clearly, modern historicism not only does not remedy this situation but, since its beginnings in the early nineteenth century has only reinforced and perpetuated it. For its “paradoxical tendency toward restoration—i.e., the tendency to reconstruct the old because it is old”—only magnified the Enlightenment’s prejudice toward tradition as nonsensical. For the “historical consciousness that emerges in Romanticism,” which had been the exception in the Enlightenment (viz., the idea of tradition as an obstacle to progress), now “has become the general rule.” Gadamer’s opposition to the strenuous iconoclasm of Enlightenment critique is rooted in the supposition that “reason exists for us only in concrete historical terms.”14 Yet even as it is being magnified by Romantic historicism, this conception of the past as lapsed and irretrievably “lost” time—to be embalmed by modern philological and archival methods devoted to a value-neutral “reconstruction” of the past—is being contested. For one thing, the procedural ethos of modern historicism comes to be challenged by the work of historical drama and fiction (e.g., Friedrich Schiller, Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, C. F. Meyer, Theodor Fontane, et al.). It also emerges as a central and deeply vexing premise for an aesthetic and philosophical response to modernity as a traumatic, indeed persistently re-traumatizing, development. Newman’s gnomic remark that “the present is a text, and the past its interpretation” is unwittingly echoed in Gadamer’s observation that “our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. Only in the multifariousness of such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part.” His much-quoted remark that “understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as an immersion into a process of tradition (Einrücken in ein Überlieferungsgeschehen) furnishes a cue for much literary and philosophical writing beginning in early Romanticism.15 It drives the archeological ethos of Wordsworth’s “Spots of Time” no less than that of Blake’s early prophetic books, agitating with iconoclastic fervor and prophetic urgency for the restoration of spiritual time to a nation (Albion) whose rabid commercialism and imperial ambition have trapped it in what Hegel was to call the “bad infinity” (schlechte Unendlichkeit) of undifferentiated, secular “progress.” Though profoundly complicated by the very different, post-human(istic) models of temporality set forth by Darwin and Nietzsche, the Romantics’ project of reconstructing a more complex, dynamic, and potentially eschatological model of time can be found to culminate in the great novelistic and philosophical projects of European modernism, such as in Thomas Mann’s rich and persistent meditations on time in The Magic Mountain (1924), Husserl’s 1905–1906 Lectures on Inner Time Consciousness (publ. 1928), and Proust’s eponymous magnum opus on lost time (1913–1927). The latter’s concept of “involuntary memory” constitutes a specifically modernist revision of the prevailing concept of time as a monochrome vector rendering equivalent and so threatening to denature all human experience. Thus the facts “recalled by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect . . . preserve nothing of the past itself.” Instead, “the past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”16 However obliquely, Proustian “sensation” echoes a central tenet of Christian theology; being radically contingent, it recalls the notion of “grace,” just as its unsought-for plenitude appears to mark the manifestation of messianic time or “revelation” within an otherwise undifferentiated model of time as the sheer succession of equivalent units of (secular) experience.
Still, by its very serendipity, Proust’s mémoire involontaire reveals how under conditions of modernity time is rarely experienced as “unfolding” or “revealing” itself in and as the present. If Proust and other modernists still cling to the possibility of an aesthetic epiphany belatedly rupturing a flat-line model of time as pure durée, the latter model is positively embraced by the existentialist stance of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). For Heidegger, modernity’s prevailing notion that life “consists of a succession of experiences ‘in time’” effectively forecloses on any methodological analysis of Dasein. Still, even the “vulgar interpretation of the ‘connectedness of life’ does not think of a framework spanned ‘outside’ of Da-sein . . . but correctly looks for it in Da-sein itself” (BT, 343; italics mine). As the telling qualification (“correctly”) makes clear, Heidegger’s analyses of Dasein are meant to be carried out free of any transcendent presuppositions or expectations. Instead, his argument is firmly anchored in an existentialist stance embodied by the “God is dead” pronouncement of Nietzsche’s madman, Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung), and Georg Simmel’s 1910 essay on “The Metaphysics of Death.” Thus Dasein “does not first fill up an objectively present path or stretch ‘of life’ through the phases of its momentary realities, but stretches itself along in such a way that its own being is constituted beforehand as this stretching along [Erstreckung].” When conceived as mere extension or Bergsonian durée, human secular time is by definition circumscribed by the contingent endpoints of birth and death: “Factical Da-sein exists as born, and, born, it is already dying in the sense of being-toward-death [Sein zum Tode]” (BT, 343).
Heidegger’s bleak framing of human existence within a temporality utterly emptied of all dynamism and meaning also shapes our conception of history (Geschichte) and of historical knowledge (Historie): “How history can become a possible object for historiography can be gathered only from the kind of being of what is historical, from historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] and its rootedness in temporality.” Decisive for our purposes is Heidegger’s contention that the being of Dasein “is not ‘temporal,’ because it ‘is in history,’ but because, on the contrary, it exists and can exist historically only because it is temporal in the ground of its being” (BT, 344–345). However cogent, such an outlook is flawed in that it posits (without taking into account countervailing arguments or indeed the possibility of its own falsification) a model of time devoid of all transcendent points of reference or forms of expectancy; for Heidegger, to understand Dasein as sheer temporality means eo ipso to be committed to a strictly formal, linear model of time as incessant “vanishing” (as Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic define it), a quintessentially modern position that, as we shall see, is also elegiac to its very core.
To suppose, as Descartes does (still rather covertly) vis-à-vis Aristotle, or as Hume, Pierre Louis Maupertius, Claude Adrien Helvetius, and Baron d’Holbach, among the philosophes do much more flamboyantly, that past conceptions and ideas are fundamentally inert, calcified, and, as so many prejudices obstructing “progress” is questionable at best. The true casualty of modernity’s amnesia, then, is not this or that idea or concept taken as a proposition—a term that in any event fails to grasp the nature of ideas. Propositions, though crucial and indispensable to rational conversation, are by their very nature subject to what John Henry Newman calls notional assent.17 Yet formal assent presupposes an antecedent view or framework of commitments that prompts us in a given situation to bestow our assent—not only to a proposition’s formal correctness but to the reality of its constituent terms and its potential truth value as such. Logically, then, this antecedent “view” or framework belongs to a categorically different realm, that of an idea in which fact and value are inextricably woven together, a domain a fortiori beyond the reach of propositional ratiocination. We here encounter the (originally Platonic) insight that key conceptions of humanistic inquiry—such as will, judgment, teleology, person, action, and a normative idea of the good—constitute the starting premise for a process of dialectical clarification and development whose inclusive and open-ended nature ensures the vitality of intellectual life qua tradition. To sharpen the point, it will help to juxtapose my account of an amnesiac modernity to the by now classical view of modernity as a story of progressive loss, depletion, and intellectual impoverishment, a narrative typically associated with a wide array of psychological ailments (melancholy, anomie, depression, ressentiment, dissociated sensibilities, etc.). In cautiously distancing itself from such “subtraction stories,” Charles Taylor’s recent account of secularization identifies its overarching concern to be the origination of a “disenchanted world, a secular society, and a post-cosmic universe.” While no longer conceiving “fullness” as a condition of lived experience such as “point[s] us inescapably to God,” modernity in Taylor’s telling amounts to an “evolutionary history,” an “Entstehungsgeschichte of exclusive humanism.”18
Right away, a qualification is in order inasmuch as neither will nor person can be approached straightforwardly as a concept in the prevailing, modern sense as a sortal term or a predicate of generic traits. Rather, each term constitutes an idea whose historical scope, effectiveness, and reality go well beyond the pragmatic and definitional spirit of ordinary concepts. Hence, if the term “concept” is to be applied to person and will at all, its meaning lies closer to what Hegel calls a “conception” (Begriff), that is, a comprehensive and dialectically mutating framework affording human beings some basic orientation about their distinctive and indisputable self-awareness as ethical agents. Yet the Hegelian attempt to capture the idea as a sequence of distinct historical modes of appearance risks becoming a strictly neutral method, a parade of successive, embodied conceptions reviewed by a modern, impersonal, and disengaged philosophical “we” that takes itself to be in possession of history as an inventory of the varied appearances of consciousness but no longer takes itself to be implicated in the underlying idea of which these appearances are the manifestation. To be sure, Hegel’s historicism is obviously nothing like the positivist enterprise of Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Jules Michelet. Yet his mode of argument, particularly in his Berlin lectures on the philosophy of history, religion, and art, undeniably laid the groundwork for a historicism that, as Gadamer has pointed out, was erroneously premised on the idea of an observer standing aloof from the dialectical “self-movement” (Selbstbewegung) of his or her subject matter and thus remaining unaware of his or her hermeneutic entanglement and contingent self-understanding. The historically circumscribed and conditioned knowledge of what Hegel calls “natural consciousness” (natürliches Bewußtsein) is categorically distinct from the reflexive awareness of Hegel’s philosophical “we,” just as the local, pragmatic meanings and their significance belatedly captured by dialectical thinking no longer stand in any substantive relation. Simply put, there always remains something adventitious and incalculable about what Hegel calls “determinate negation.”19 Where the hermeneutic structure of understanding goes unrecognized, intention soon will be supplanted by the adventitious movement of the idea; action morphs into process, and the uniqueness of the human person is sublated into the impersonal authority of what Hegel calls System.
Inevitably, the question—answered powerfully in the affirmative by Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin, among others—becomes whether Hegel might not be the one thinker to have charted for us how post-Cartesian modernity at last succeeded in overcoming its debilitating, undialectical (in origin nominalist) model of knowledge as sheer “sense-certainty,” thereby supplanting an adversarial outlook on the past with a containment strategy that throughout the nineteenth century held nearly unimpeded sway under the name of historicism. Put as a question, is the specifically modern kind of forgetting (of intellectual traditions) traced in this book merely an instance of what Hegel calls Aufhebung? To begin answering that question, it helps to stay with Taylor’s markedly Hegelian account. Echoing some key passages from the “Preface” to Hegel’s Phenomenology, Taylor observes that “our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by the story of how we got there” and that “our past is sedimented in our present.”20 And yet, unlike Hegel’s organic trope according to which the beginning lives on to the extent that it has been thoroughly “conceptualized” (begriffen) by what ensues, Taylor’s geological metaphor of sedimentation underscores a point that the argument that I shall unfold below emphatically contests. The past is not a residue; it does not live on in fossilized trace amounts, nor indeed in the virtual, abrasion-free domain of the “concept.” Nor indeed does the past unilaterally “define [our] sense . . . of how we got there.” Indeed, in Faulkner’s and T. S. Eliot’s poignant formulation, it is not even past. Eliot, in particular, had famously stressed how tradition “cannot be inherited” but, instead, must be “obtain[ed] by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense” and that, in turn, “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” Moreover, while this sense “makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity,” it also enables him to rearticulate the past’s deeper significance in light of present dynamics; thus one “will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present.”21 When allowed to operate within a hermeneutic, rather than informational, model of knowledge, inherited conceptions and ideas furnish us—less in the spirit of a “definition” than that of motivation and opportunity—with the intellectual and spiritual meanings that stand to be continuously husbanded and cultivated further if we are ever to achieve any orientation in our own present.
Unlike Gadamer, MacIntyre, and, well before them Newman—whose strongly related conceptions of tradition we will consider momentarily—Taylor seems notably vague about this crucial question: what is the relation that responsible knowledge—viz., knowledge not merely sought and appraised with regard to its causal efficacy and contingent utility but integrated into an articulated framework of human ends—bears to the past? Consider the following passage:
It is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition. Thus we are widely aware of living in a “disenchanted” universe; and our use of this word bespeaks our sense that it was once enchanted. More, we are not only aware that it used to be so, but that it was also a struggle and an achievement to get where we are; and that in some respects this achievement is fragile. We know this because each one of us as we grew up has had to take on the disciplines of disenchantment.22
What is left unclear is whether modernity’s self-authorizing claims to “having overcome a previous condition” are at all commensurable with our “sense” (Taylor’s notably vague word) of “where we are.” No doubt, beginning with Luther, Galileo, and Bacon, and continuing through Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, modernity has been deeply enmeshed with the genres of auto-narration and a familiar language of struggle and emancipation that Northrop Frye has identified as generic features of the quest romance. Yet it is a mistake to conclude, as Taylor does, that the fragility of “this achievement” is merely a consequence of modernity’s apparent incompletion. Instead, modernity’s precariousness—so vividly attested by its epiphenomenal psychopathologies of Angst, paranoia, and melancholy, and by its ubiquitous rhetoric of “crisis”—stems from how that quest itself was being conceived and pursued. For by its self-legitimation as the overcoming of “a previous condition,” and as the ongoing repudiation of so-called premodern frameworks, conceptions, and ideas no longer engaged dialectically but unilaterally declared irrelevant or inimical to the endeavor now at stake, modernity made disorientation its founding premise and enduring condition.
In taking up these questions, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953) proves to be a good point of departure. Among the aspects of modern historicism repeatedly flagged by Strauss is its emphatic “this-worldliness,” its principled, positivist rejection of transcendence as an authentic form of experience. Characteristic of historicism—as of Heidegger’s notion of modernity defined by a “world picture”—is the totalizing claim that “history was thought to supply the only empirical, and hence the only solid, knowledge of what is truly human.” What is glossed over is the question as to what exactly it is that should allow a historicist mode of explanation to compel the “assent” of those individuals whose intellectual, spiritual, economic, and cultural coordinates it purports to draw in exhaustive and authoritative detail. The historicist conception of knowledge as technique and method, in other words, takes as a given our assent to the specific narratives thus produced. Here Strauss demurs, for to take that view is to have “obscured the fact that particular or historical standards can become authoritative only on the basis of a universal principle which imposes an obligation on the individual to accept, or to bow to, the standards suggested by the tradition or the situation which has molded him.”23 Having thus evacuated any transcendent, sacred dimension from history and construing it as a strictly factitious and sequential occurrence, the authority of modern knowledge is precariously entwined with the methodological and conceptual protocol that governs the telling of its results.
As Strauss argues, we are left with an unbridled historicism forever struggling to legitimate its account of human experience and bereft of any transcendent notions (the good, the beautiful, the just, reason) for which one will inevitably be searching when faced with the choice of accepting this or that account of human experience. Historicism is the very embodiment of Heidegger’s “business” (Betrieb) and sheer “talk” (Gerede): that is, a transactional, impersonal, and open-ended accumulation of “facts” aimed at furnishing the answer to a question that has never been properly asked. It is the quintessentially post-charismatic discourse of modernity, in the sense that it no longer conceives narrative as capable of breaking from chronological time but as merely accumulating knowledge within the matrix of empirical, equivalent, and as such a-semantic units of measurement.24 In engaging early twentieth-century theories of agency (in particular, Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action), Iris Murdoch thus characterizes the rhetorical and conceptual stance of modernity as one of overwhelming “dryness.” Though not quite sharing Murdoch’s unvarnished Platonism, Leo Strauss’s critique of historicism reaches fundamentally similar conclusions: “the historical standards, the standards thrown up by this meaningless process, could no longer claim to be hallowed by sacred powers behind that process. The only standards that remained were of a purely subjective character, standards that had no other support than the free choice of the individual . . . Historicism culminated in nihilism. The attempt to make man absolutely at home in the world ended in man’s becoming absolutely homeless,” quite simply because any instance of “thought that recognizes the relativity of all comprehensive views has a different character from thought which is under the spell of, or which adopts, a comprehensive view. The former is absolute and neutral; the latter is relative and committed.”25 Bearing out this dichotomy to the fullest extent, Hegel’s philosophy shows how human flourishing and philosophical cognition have terminally parted company. Yet the question remains whether this impersonal, detached, and supposedly value-neutral mode of cognition is a viable strategy for humanistic inquiry. The point on which Hegel seems to be hedging concerns the question of whether humanistic inquiry could ever admit of anything like the fact/value distinction that has played such a crucial role in the modern era. For even as the “theoretical analysis of life is noncommittal and fatal to commitment,” life can never be of the same kind as a theory of it: “life means commitment.”26 If that much can still be agreed on, it is hard to see how historicism can ever furnish a viable framework for humanistic inquiry. Again, it ought to be stressed that the choice here is not between historicism and a-historical knowledge, as is often suggested by the former’s stalwart defenders. Rather, the question is whether a historicist mode of inquiry can possibly do justice to our irreducibly ethical involvement with such elemental and indispensable conceptions as will, person, teleology, judgment, self-awareness, responsibility, introspection—ideas without which humanistic inquiry is not even conceivable.
1. Question Concerning Technology, 134/Holzwege, 92.
2. E. R. Curtius, quoted in Le Goff, History and Memory, 27; Jauss, “Modernity and Literary Tradition,” 333. See also Gillespie, Theological Origins, 1–18; Jameson, Singular Modernity, 17–41; and Buckley, Origins, 25–26.
3. Friedrich Ohly, “Synagoga and Ecclesia: Typologisches in Mittelalterlicher Dichtung” (1966), quoted in Jauss, “Modernity and Literary Tradition,” 336.
4. On this concept, see Chandler, England in 1819, 67–84; on the modern conception of the “epoch,” see Blumenberg, LMA, 27–51; Koselleck, Futures Past, 93–104.
5. Recalling more comprehensive arguments to the same effect from his earlier On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1905–1906), Husserl in his 1910–1911 lectures on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology points out how any instance of an “intentional relation” yields a “phenomenological datum” whose identity “in diverse acts of consciousness . . . is not an extra-phenomenological fact, but itself something phenomenologically given . . . Not only do we now have an expectation of the datum, then a perception of it, then a memory as retention, then a recollection, then a repeated recollection, but these series of acts also stand as series before our consciousness in the recollecting reflection [stehen als Reihen in der wiedererinnernden Reflexion vor unserem Bewußtsein]” (Basic Problems, 68).
6. Origins, 7.
7. De Irā, 3.12.4.
8. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 39; Hegel, PS, 44/PG, 57; Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 15; K. Polanyi, Great Transformation, esp. 35–70; Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 116; Buckley, Origins, 348; Arendt, HC, 41; Blumenberg, LMA, 126; C. Taylor, Secular Age, 146; see also Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 11–21.
9. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 57; on modern chronological or wholly distended conception of time, see ibid., 322–351. On the transformed conception of time, see E. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, 2:104–118; Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, 251–275; Koselleck, Futures Past, 93–104. Huizinga’s famous opening meditation is worth recalling: “To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulæ” (Waning of the Middle Ages, 1).
10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 64; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25.
11. On Hobbes’s conception of time, see Pocock, Politics, 148–201; Giddens, Consequences, 20.
12. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 96; Pocock, Politics, 151–152.
13. Benjamin, Illuminations, 262–264.
14. Truth and Method, 275, 277. Gadamer continues: “In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being” (278); for a somewhat critical account of Gadamer’s argument, see Auerochs, “Gadamer über Tradition.”
15. J. H. Newman, in Ker, John Henry Newman, 206; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 284, 291. To render the German Überlieferung as “tradition” risks activating inapposite connotations of stasis and primordial determinacy, especially in an Anglo-American cultural context; and yet, Gadamer himself emphasizes that Überlieferung involves a living, fluid, and dialectical process of “transmission” that most definitely “does not persist because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated, . . . and it is active in all historical change.”
16. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 (Swann’s Way), 59–60; italics mine. On recollection, time, and the ennui of modern bourgeois psychology in Thomas Mann, see Pfau, “From Mediation to Medium.”
17. For Newman’s discussion of notional assent—which “seems like inference” and which he parses into profession, credence, and opinion, see Grammar of Assent, 49–65; on Newman’s theory of assent and its broader objectives and quasi-phenomenological orientation, see Jay Newman, Mental Philosophy, 14–29; and Richardson, Newman’s Approach, 67–92. On the Grammar’s inconsistent underpinnings, partially informed by a radical empiricism (in the spirit of Reid rather than Locke or Hume) ingeniously mobilized on behalf of a critique of Protestant fideism and, on the other hand, an “essentially modern” (“all too English, all too Anglican”) probabilistic conception of faith, see Milbank, “What is Living and What is Dead.” For an earlier critique, see Price, Belief, 315–348.
18. Secular Age, 26.
19. On this key problem of “transition” in Hegel, see Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here” and Pinkard on “Philosophy as Communal Self-Reflection” in Hegel’s Phenomenology, 260–268.
20. “Just as little as a building is finished when its foundation has been laid, so little is the achieved Notion [Begriff] of the whole the whole itself. When we wish to see an oak with its massive trunk and spreading branches and foliage, we are not content to be shown an acorn instead. So, too, Science, the crown of a world of Spirit, is not complete in its beginnings . . . Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but as Subject . . . The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development [das durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen]” (PS, 7, 10–11).
21. As Eliot continues, “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, 37–45.
22. Ibid., 28, 29. Taylor rightly notes that modernity for the past several centuries has certainly not yet entered upon a phase where “there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated.” Thus far, at least, “unbelief . . . is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition which can’t only be described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of ‘having overcome’ the irrationality of belief” (269).
23. Natural Right and History, 15, 17.
24. To understand how post-charismatic historicist narrative has supplanted the premodern possibility of “revelation” with a monochrome notion of “information,” it helps to recall the etymology of “charisma”—viz., “a free gift or favour specially vouchsafed by God; a grace, a talent” (OED); while in modern English the term first surfaces in R. Montagu (1642), its etymology goes back to the Greek kharisma (“favor, divine gift”) and the verbal form, kharizesthai (“to show favor to”), which in turn derives from kharis (“grace, beauty, kindness”). Also pertinent is the relation to the Greek kairos, which signifies the “right or opportune moment” and thus stands in express antithesis to the other word for time: chronos. Chronos denotes merely chronological or sequential (i.e., quantitative) time, whereas kairos refers to the puncturing of merely chronological time by an interlude, a moment where the sacred, unanticipated, and revelatory may occur.
25. Natural Right and History, 18, 25; somewhat polemically, Strauss urges the central point: “The epoch which regarded Aristotle’s fundamental questions as obsolete completely lacked clarity about what the fundamental issues are” (ibid., 23).
26. Ibid., 27.