“A LARGE MENTAL FIELD”
Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge after Newman
Leo Strauss’s critique leaves us with the impression of modern historicism as above all a distancing technique, driven by modernity’s visceral fear of the unknown and its consequent resistance to any transcendent or otherwise heteronymous authority. Echoing and elaborating Strauss’s view, Hans-Georg Gadamer was to argue that “our usual relationship to the past is not characterized by distancing and freeing ourselves from tradition [Überlieferung] . . . We do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar, a kind of cognizance.” The first manifestation of reason, and the basis for all subsequent acts of understanding, thus involves our intuitive awareness as being related to, rather than estranged from, the specific phenomena under investigation. By its very nature, human inquiry is never a purely random product of gratuitous spontaneity but, instead, belongs to the realm of action. It constitutes a response to a calling, that is, to phenomena soliciting our attention and engaging our intelligence. This they do because, in a strictly pre-discursive (indeed ontological) sense, we achieve self-awareness and purposive orientation in our life world only because we are already embedded in and committed to it in what Heidegger calls an attitude of “care” (Sorge).
For Gadamer, “the anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition.”1 What (with an oblique nod to Husserl) Gadamer calls “the ontological structure of understanding” we shall find to be at the very heart of Coleridge’s phenomenology of the human person, conscience, and the responsible will. Against the autistic models of human agency proffered by Descartes and Hobbes, Coleridge’s focus on personhood is prima facie ethical rather than epistemological. His Aids to Reflection and Opus Maximum thus conceive of personhood as essentially relational. The person originates in, and is subsequently sustained by, her or his relation with another being—a metaphysical truth (as Coleridge and, following him, John Henry Newman were to argue) first made apparent by the phenomenology of human “conscience”—that is, by an incontrovertible awareness that the sense of relatedness and obligation to the other is sanctioned by the vertical rapport (however latent, tenuous, and/or susceptible to misconstrual and neglect) that all persons have with the divine logos.
The same metaphysical truth thus revealed in the person’s relation with the other—apprehended as a “thou” rather than an impersonal he or she—also relates to our continuous appraisal of ambient phenomena to a supra-personal, normative logos. Colin Gunton thus emphasizes how tradition “involves a personal relatedness to others in both past and future time,” as well as our “recognition of the uniqueness and value of that which is given . . . To deny the salutary character of tradition is to say that we can only be ourselves by freeing ourselves from others.”2 Though Gunton himself does not make the connection, what he later elaborates under the heading of “open transcendentals” characterizes rather precisely the notion of tradition that this book means to reconstitute, specifically with reference to the concept of the will and the idea of the person. They, too, qualify as an open transcendental,
a notion in some way basic to the human thinking process, which empowers a continuing and in principle unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being. The quest is indeed a universal one, to find concepts which do succeed in some way or other in representing or echoing the universal marks of being. But it is also to find concepts whose value will be found not primarily in their clarity and certainty, but in their suggestiveness and potentiality for being deepened and enriched, during the continuing process of thought, from a wide range of sources in human life and culture.3
Intellectual traditions, and the concepts of which they are variously composed, thus attest both to the transcendent and universalizing telos that impels human thought and to the necessary incompleteness and boundless variety that tradition-bound understanding will display over time. Far from a merely impersonal method or abstract procedure, all “understanding” constitutes a response to the calling of a specific phenomenon, a person or thing whose apparent rationality solicits our attention and sustained engagement. As Gadamer has argued, such a calling marks the beginning of a sustained, quasi-dialogic progression wherein acts of judgment or, rather, prejudgment undergo continual development and revision as a result of our openness to, and reflection on, emergent evidence and competing interpretations. The objection, famously advanced by Jürgen Habermas, that such a view reifies tradition as a single, monolithic, and oppressive superego of sorts altogether misconstrues Gadamer’s argument. Tradition (Überlieferungsgeschehen) is not some metaphysical notion gratuitously constraining the ebb and flow of rational thought. Rather, in the manner of Kant’s regulative principles, it posits the continuity of ideas over significant stretches of historical time, absent which rational conversation on any variety of issues could not be effectively pursued, indeed could not even be conceived as a project. Rationality is not a property either intrinsic to or (under certain conditions) ascribed to the mere temporal punctum of the present. Instead, reason only ever crystallizes to the extent that present objectives and exigencies are interpretively framed and reexamined as variations, and thus as more or less apparent manifestations of an idea dialectically transmitted from the past.4
In his seminal 1845 work on The Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman makes an especially eloquent and compelling case for a conception of knowledge as interpretive and evaluative, rather than impersonal and computational in kind—an argument that by a series of intermediate steps leads him to regard humanistic (and specifically religious) knowledge as inextricably entwined with our deepening grasp of historical continuity. As Newman puts it, “it is the characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before us. No sooner do we apprehend than we judge: we allow nothing to stand by itself: we compare, contrast, abstract, generalize, connect, adjust, classify: and we view all our knowledge in the associations with which these processes have invested it.”5 What distinguishes judgment from mere opinion, and so underwrites its greater probity and significance, is its continuity over time; whereas opinions “come and go,” judgments are gradually recognized to be “firmly fixed in our minds, with or without good reason, and have a hold upon us, whether they relate to matters of fact, or to principles of conduct, or are views of life and the world, or are prejudices, imaginations, or convictions.”
Crucially, the apparent durability of judgments is not a sign of rigidity or inertia; on the contrary, their phenomenology within the mind is altogether dynamic. Whereas opinion is merely reactive and tends to expire along with the transient impression that had solicited it, judgment is the catalyst of an ongoing dialectic transformation of both the judging subject and the idea or phenomenon with which it is engaged: “The idea which represents an object or supposed object is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects, however they may vary in the separate consciousness of individuals; and in proportion to the variety of aspects under which it presents itself to various minds is its force and depth, and the argument for its reality. Ordinarily an idea is not brought home to the intellect as objective except through this variety” (DCD, 34). Notwithstanding its momentous doctrinal implications, even the “idea” of Christianity’s substantive identity over 1,800 years remains subject to the same hermeneutic circle that governs all human cognition: “in all matters of human life, presumption verified by instances, is our ordinary instrument of proof,” though Newman hedges ever so slightly by adding that “if the antecedent probability is great, it almost supersedes instances” (DCD, 113–114; italics mine).
Yet wherever the tension between a metaphysical and a historical conception of truth and evidence threatens to unravel his argument, Newman neither eschews the antagonism nor simply commits to one position. Rather, he mines the conflict itself for further insight. Time and again he insists that history is not some anti-metaphysical, nuts-and-bolts sphere, but that its material development is suffused with hermeneutic, interpretive commitments on the part of the human agents involved in it: “the event which is the development is also the interpretation of the prediction . . . [and] provides a fulfillment by imposing a meaning” (DCD, 102). Newman cautiously navigates between a view of history as the incremental revelation of a transcendent truth and an existentialist (Gadamerian) framework that conceives hermeneutic activity as a case of Aristotelian phronēsis—that is, of practical reason at once generative of and continually tested and revised by its dialectical “process of transmission” (Überlieferungsgeschehen).6 Any suggestion of a conflict between tradition and development, memory and innovation, merely exposes the ignorance of either term on the part of those venturing such a claim. As Michael Buckley has forcefully argued,
there is only an apparent contradiction between discovery and tradition. The disclosure of what is new only superficially excludes the transmission of what is old. Actually, discovery can only light upon what is hidden within the given, while a tradition can possess significance, can perdure, only if that which is past is continually made present, changed, reinterpreted, and transposed—if only to be understood by succeeding generations. Discovery is the grasp of new meaning; tradition is its mediation . . . A tradition in the history of ideas, then, presents theological discovery with its own prior and repeated discoveries and verifications . . . Vital traditions are the situations of the present. Tradition is the contemporary presence of the past.7
Inasmuch as humanistic inquiry necessarily unfolds within history, it can never be reduced to an aggregate of interconnected, logical propositions, let alone to a definitive knowledge of and utopian emancipation from the past. A specific idea will crystallize only by means of “fore-judgments” (Vorurteile) destined to undergo continuous revision. In the course of such a process, “aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form,” and what Newman’s eponymous work means by “development” is a dialectical working out of sorts, “the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field” (DCD, 38). Such a process is never simply carried forward by individual acts of occasional introspection or private, ritualized meditation; rather, the movement of an idea is necessarily trans-generational, inter-subjective, and materially concrete. Against the Cartesian or (more pertinent to Newman) Lockean idea of a “punctual self,” Newman’s theory of development rests on “a phenomenological account of what actually happens when a person comes to know what he or she knows,” and to trace the development of an idea within such a framework is to understand knowing as “the activity not of a mind in isolation but of the whole, living person.”8
Ideas and the intellectual traditions to which they incrementally give rise are the very catalysts and source of any ethical community seeking to articulate and realize supra-personal meanings and ends. At the other end of the spectrum we find social formations associated with classical (Lockean) liberalism and contemporary libertarian ideologies, that is, a contract-based, adventitious, and transient “enterprise association” (to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s term) of competitive individuals pursuing their economic interests in grudging fulfillment of certain enumerated legal obligations. As the impoverished character of the public sphere and political discourse in the United States amply demonstrates, any purely interest-based social formation is prone to the hyper-pluralism whose Protestant origins Brad Gregory has recently traced in such compelling detail; and being so preoccupied with the conflict and apparent incommensurability of individual values, beliefs, and rights it necessarily fails to articulate a trans-generational and supra-personal vision for itself as a community. Simply put, a political community no longer capable of distinguishing between engaging an idea and holding an opinion—and hence bereft of a culture of reflection, imagination, and “negative capability” (as John Keats had called it)—is almost certainly in a phase of advanced decline. Pondering utilitarianism’s rapid emergence as Britain’s dominant political and economic framework, Coleridge (as we shall see in Part IV) was among the first to realize that a society defined solely by private interests and personal claim rights has effectively lost sight of reason, the faculty concerned not with contingent propositions but with ideas. For ideas are necessarily concerned with ends, not means, and unlike propositions they have themselves agency. Their force and significance stems less from their logical conclusiveness than from their charismatic presence within a social imaginary. Echoing Hegel’s thesis about social process as the progressive “working out” or “realization” (Verwirklichung) of an underlying conception—which Gadamer would later analyze under the heading of “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte)—Newman sets out his notion of “development” in a particularly eloquent passage that warrants quoting in full:
when some great enunciation, whether true or false, about human nature, or present good, or government, or duty, or religion, is carried forward into the public throng of men and draws attention, then it is not merely received passively in this or that form into many minds, but it becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever-new contemplation of itself, to an application of it in various directions, and a propagation of it on every side . . . At first men will not fully realise what it is that moves them, and will express and explain themselves inadequately. There will be a general agitation of thought, and an action of mind upon mind. There will be a time of confusion, when conceptions and misconceptions are in conflict, and it is uncertain whether anything is to come of the idea at all, or which view of it is to get the start of the others. New lights will be brought to bear upon the original statements of the doctrine put forward; judgments and aspects will accumulate. After a while some definite teaching emerges; and, as time proceeds, one view will be modified or expanded by another, and then combined with a third; till the idea to which these various aspects belong, will be to each mind separately what at first it was only to all together . . . The multitude of opinions formed concerning it in these respects and many others will be collected, compared, sorted, sifted, selected, rejected, gradually attached to it, separated from it, in the minds of individuals and of the community. It will, in proportion to its native vigour and subtlety, introduce itself into the framework and details of social life, changing public opinion, and strengthening or undermining the foundations of established order. Thus in time it will have grown into an ethical code, or into a system of government, or into a theology, or into a ritual, according to its capabilities: and this body of thought, thus laboriously gained, will after all be little more than the proper representative of one idea, being in substance what that idea meant from the first, its complete image as seen in a combination of diversified aspects, with the suggestions and corrections of many minds, and the illustration of many experiences. (DCD, 36–38)
Among the many things that are striking and instructive in this passage is Newman’s insistence on the catholicity—the breadth and universality—of an idea; there is no hint of sectarianism here, nor of the self-regarding relativism of, say, Stanley Fish’s professional or “interpretive communities”—where disagreement is peremptorily taken as evidence of incommensurability, and where the Platonic, Thomist, and Hegelian models of disputatio and dialectics have been all but supplanted by the narcissism and “delirious nonstop monologue of . . . so many in-group narratives.”9 For an idea to become effective as “an active principle” within a community, it must be apprehended as a conception of apparent significance and potential, supra-personal authority. Ideas and conceptions are not so much “thought out” or conjured up in a hermeneutic vacuum; nor, for that matter, are they something possessed in the manner of a commodity, or “held” qua “opinion.” Rather, they are received on trust and, as such, stand to be “compared, sorted, sifted, selected”—in short, to be engaged dialogically, interpersonally, and in ways bound to transform both the knower and the known.
For rather obvious reasons, Newman’s principal exhibit in support of his thesis concerns the “antecedent probability . . . that the Christianity of the second, fourth, seventh, twelfth, sixteenth, and intermediate centuries is in its substance the very religion which Christ and His Apostles taught in the first” (DCD, 5). Yet his main contention extends well beyond the religious controversies of the day and his own prolonged theological and personal struggles with conversion. It is a point that, in a different idiom, proves just as critical for modern phenomenology: viz., that if there is to be such a thing as responsible and responsive human understanding, its initial presumption has to be in favor of the substantive identity and temporal continuity of those phenomena with which the intellect takes itself to be engaged. For Newman, that basic premise constitutes “not a violent assumption . . . , but rather mere abstinence from the wanton admission of a principle which would necessarily lead to the most vexatious and preposterous scepticism.”10 The first step in any legitimate intellectual progression must be one of assent, not to a proposition or opinion, but to the truth of the phenomenon’s sheer givenness: “to be just able to doubt is no warrant for disbelieving.” Yet that ultimately means to accept, indeed positively embrace and continuously sift the rich and intricate historical filiations of all our conceptions. Having long struggled with Anglo-Protestantism’s self-image as a caesura akin to the revolutions that Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes had wrought in science, philosophy, and politics, Newman insists on the continuity of Christianity and implicitly rejects the sectarian, fideist, and denominationalist character of modern religious culture: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” (DCD, 5–8). We can detect here an essential analogy between how Husserl or Michael Polanyi understand human knowledge, viz., as constituted through our sustained participation in (rather than unilateral domination of) specific phenomena, and what Newman means by the development of an idea.
At the same time, Newman readily concedes that the development of an idea may in many cases come to nothing, that ideas may eventually be “rejected” either because of their false premises or their tendency to license mistaken, even absurd conclusions. Consequently, a “process will not be a development, unless the assemblage of aspects, which constitute its ultimate shape, really belongs to the idea from which they start.”11 What makes the distinction between opinion and judgment so pivotal is the antagonism—beyond remediation for Newman by the time he writes his 1845 book—between a Protestant and a Catholic conception of Christianity; in Newman’s strident formulation, the former rests on the “hypothesis . . . that Christianity does not fall within the province of history,—that it is to each man what each man thinks it to be, and nothing else,” that it is but a set of Wittgensteinian “family resemblances” or, as the Essay puts it, “a mere name for a cluster or family of rival religions all together [or] . . . at variance one with another” (DCD, 4). Consistent with Newman’s lifelong opposition to any conjunction of belief with “private judgment” (DCD, 6) and “opinion,” his Essay above all attempts to work out a dialectic that fuses together judgment, knowledge, and history. The development of an idea, and the immanent law of intellectual traditions and the responsible knowledge to be achieved in them, is not attained by contingent claims or definitions. Rather, such knowledge must begin by immersing oneself in the history of usages, adaptations, distortions, and abuses that cumulatively circumscribe the valence and significance of a specific conception.
Yet in a rather more controversial move that has occasionally been likened to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Newman also insists that the development of an idea (specifically that of Christian doctrine) is not to be misconstrued as some inexorable deduction of consequences from a single premise.12 Instead, there is something markedly adventitious to Newman’s theory of development, similar to the vacillating and contingent ways in which, beginning with Plato and Pythagoras, the concepts of will and person gradually took shape under often highly adversarial conditions. More than Hegel, Newman seems prepared to recognize the vicarious and uneven nature of historical processes, including the discursive and meta-discursive operations wherein the manifold entailments of an idea, and indeed its “antecedent probability” itself, are incrementally realized:
its action being in the busy scene of human life, [an idea] cannot progress at all without cutting across, and thereby destroying or modifying and incorporating with itself existing modes of thinking and operating. The development then of an idea is not like an investigation worked out on paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their leaders and guides; and it employs their minds as its instruments, and depends upon them, while it uses them. (DCD, 38)
Against the hardening line of the Catholic magisterium, particularly during the later years of Pius IX’s papacy (as embodied in his 1864 Syllabus), the “ecclesiastical vagabond” Newman took considerable intellectual risks by opposing both any metaphysical claims regarding the inerrancy of dogma and all contemporary, liberal doctrines of historical “progress.”13 His view of knowledge as sustained “investigation” (as opposed to gratuitous, and skeptical “inquiry”) eschews a doctrinaire and over-reaching foundationalism while at the same time avoiding the anti-foundationalism that fuels contemporary historicism, and which in time would meet its foreordained end in the radical perspectivalism of the later Nietzsche. The idea of tradition, then, allows Newman to tether human knowledge to empirical particulars without therefore losing all capacity for understanding how it is implicated in a notion of transcendent truth. To frame knowledge as an immersion in a process of transmission is to embrace “a rationality appropriate to created knowers in a world with which they are continuous.”14
To be sure, Newman’s idea of an “investigation” still amounts to an “advancement” of insight into the specific subject at hand, as well as a deepening sense of responsibility for the knowledge thus achieved. Yet the dialectical movement known as “tradition” that binds knower and known in a reciprocal dialogue in which what we receive is not prized as a possession (dominium) but as something to be cultivated and gifted (donum) to those who come after us, can no longer be construed as “progress” in the ordinary Enlightenment sense. Nicholas Lash’s claim that Newman “believed in religious progress as little as he believed in secular progress” rings fundamentally true, though Robert Pattison’s observation that “Newman was the creature of the liberalism he despised” seems no less to the point.15 To resolve this tension, one must first desynonymize progress from development. Doing so, at least briefly, is called for inasmuch as a non-teleological yet dynamic conception of intellectual traditions is to provide a framework for the inquiry into the concepts of will and person that is to follow. That is, concepts are hermeneutic frames that evolve and are transformed by the “effective history” of their application and by the contested and shifting interpretations put on them. In Newman’s words, “power of development is a proof of life, not only in its essay, but especially in its success”; and, in a remark likely to have disquieted many of those in Rome later tasked with reviewing the merits of his proposed elevation to cardinal, Newman baldly states that “the idea never was that throve and lasted, yet, like mathematical truth, incorporated nothing from external sources” (DCD, 186). Not only, then, do the criteria Newman adduces as prima facie evidence of an idea’s intrinsic truth (“Preservation of Type,” “Continuity of Principles,” “Power of Assimilation,” “Logical Sequence,” etc.) attest to his profoundly dynamic view of how conceptions and ideas evolve over time; they also affirm the priority of practical reason over theoretical argumentation and description. Like Hegel, Newman thus approaches history as a succession of material changes and intellectual developments whose underlying focal point—the idea of freedom for Hegel; the “antecedent probability” of Christian truth for Newman—and operative logic remain perforce elusive to the individual and communal agents instrumental to its advancement. Inasmuch as an idea “employs their minds as its instruments, and depends upon them, while it uses them” (DCD, 38), the implicit rationality of conceptions taken up “on faith” and worked through by successive generations will gradually divulge itself, provided the idea in question had sufficient weight and significance not to expire in its struggle with competing notions or succumb to inner contradictions or corruptions. As Newman puts it, “logic is brought in to arrange and inculcate what no science was employed in gaining . . . [For] intellectual processes are carried on silently and spontaneously in the mind of a party or school, of necessity come to light at a later date and are recognized, and their issues are scientifically arranged” (DCD, 190).
Precisely because Newman’s theory is so pointedly dialectic, indeed agonistic, it is impossible to distill the idea in question from any one of the discrete stages through which it successively passes. Thus it would be incorrect to say that an idea undergoes development. Rather, a process of development gradually fleshes out, fills in, and so “realizes” the meaning and significance of a specific, and at first cryptic idea or motif. Indeed, it is the sheer persistence of a conception throughout its numerous adversarial encounters with competing ideas that incrementally corroborates its truth value—though even after 1,800 years the latter is not to be taken as a metaphysical truth but merely as a state of heightened probability:16
An idea not only modifies, but is modified, or at least influenced, by the state of things in which it is carried out, and is dependent in various ways on the circumstances which surround it. Its development proceeds quickly or slowly, as it may be; the order of succession in its separate stages is variable; it shows differently in a small sphere of action and in an extended; it may be interrupted, retarded, mutilated, distorted, by external violence; it may be enfeebled by the effort of ridding itself of domestic foes; it may be impeded and swayed or even absorbed by counter energetic ideas; it may be coloured by the received tone of thought into which it comes, or depraved by the intrusion of foreign principles, or at length shattered by the development of some original fault within it. But whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. (DCD, 39–40)
Truth and “survival” appear nearly convertible terms in this passage, whose vivid depiction of an idea’s abrasive and transformative “intercourse with the world” not only highlights Newman’s empiricist sympathies and his very English “preoccupation with the concrete” but also explains why some readers have read the Essay as anticipating Darwin’s theory of natural selection.17
However that may be, the logic of development set out here furnishes an apt matrix for our hermeneutic engagement with intellectual traditions and the possibility of an expanded “self-understanding” (Gadamer’s Selbstverstehen) opened up by that encounter.18 Whereas a number of impressive accounts of modernity (e.g., those of Charles Taylor, Hans Blumenberg, John Milbank, Louis Dupré, Hannah Arendt, Michael Gillespie) have unfolded as high-altitude surveys of intellectual shifts and diverse, often competing strands of inquiry, the following argument seeks to capture the intrinsic idea of will and person through a series of forensic readings of representative arguments. For any account of competing or intersecting intellectual traditions has to rest on the kind of close, textual analysis that, at its best, has always been the bread and butter of literary studies. To render intellectual history vivid and engaging, and so become alert to the profound stakes of its contested ideas and genealogies of inquiry, one must pay scrupulous attention to the rhetorical maneuvers, metaphoric shifts, ellipses, competing translations, and countless stylistic quirks and symptoms of its preeminent voices. Like Newman, whose pellucid style rarely fails to make us feel the heat and stakes of a specific argument, the following readings (though undoubtedly falling woefully short of his rhetorical gifts) proceed from a view of intellectual culture, and of the life of the mind, as a profoundly dialectical, indeed agonistic process; and like Newman, arguably one of the great controversialists of his age, I believe that controversy, even polemic, can at times help restore clarity, especially where (as in our contemporary, self-consciously “professionalized” academic landscape) substantive and informed argument often appears on the verge of being supplanted by what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences.
Still, notwithstanding his gifts as a polemicist and writer of so many tracts, sermons, essays, and lectures seemingly tailored to transient occasions, Newman never lost sight of his underlying purpose, viz., to demonstrate how the flourishing of the human individuals pivots on their commitment in thought and action to the reality of a transcendent idea. What in the Essay secures the integrity of development as a complex, agonistic, and trans-generational progression is a single and continuously discernible motif. Already in the tenth of his Oxford University Sermons, Newman had emphasized how all inquiry hinges on anticipations of meaning—Gadamer’s “pre-understanding” (Vorverständnis)—since in the absence of such praejudicata opinioni it would be logically impossible to correlate the evidence that is to either confirm or disprove them at all. Far from originating in some incidental and passive apprehension of brute facts, all understanding begins with a “view,” a commitment to a hypothesis or idea whose hold on the intellect is as palpable as it is destined to undergo continual revaluation and revision. Newman’s “antecedent probability” thus amounts to a hermeneutic projection “that gives meaning to those arguments from facts which are commonly called the Evidences of Revelation”; and he adds that if “mere probability proves nothing, mere facts persuade no one; that probability is to fact as the soul to the body; that mere presumptions may have no force, but that mere facts have no warmth.”19
Newman’s conception of “development” thus cannot be dismissed as a petitio principi, that is, as an illusory and gratuitous imposition of “consistency and form” on a supposedly random concatenation of interpretations, usages, and adaptations.20 In a rather daring inversion of a common trope, Newman thus portrays a living tradition as an open-ended process of clarification, a successive deepening and consolidating of an initially cryptic meaning first introduced in his Oxford University Sermons under the heading of “implicit reason.” Filled with intellectual struggle, conflict, and trial, the passage of historical time thus exposes—in ways that no syllogistic method ever can—the deeper semantic strata of an idea, and in so doing attests to the “antecedent probability” of that idea’s truth by acknowledging its undiminished capacity for engaging and transforming individuals and communities in continued and focused hermeneutic activity:
It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. (DCD, 39–40)
Echoes of Newman’s idea of “development,” some casual and others far more systematic, abound. One may recall John Ruskin, fellow Oxonian, who in his preface to the final volume of Modern Painters remarks on his own evolving aesthetic conceptions: “all true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree—not of a cloud.” The same ratio of malleability and continuity informs Gadamer’s characterization of understanding as vicariously inserting the subject into “a process of transmission” (Überlieferungsgeschehen); likewise, Michael Buckley argues for a movement of intellectual history “towards control, not in the sense of technical use, but in the sense that wonder or puzzlement advance toward an adequate grasp of a state of affairs, as the internal coherence of its material elements and their formal relationships is determined.”21
The present argument is above all an attempt at retrieving the deep history of two concepts whose centrality to a nuanced understanding of human agency had gradually crystallized in the complex philosophical and theological landscape of the Hellenistic era and its amalgamation with earlier, Aristotelian thought by high Scholasticism. By the time we reach Hobbes and Locke, yet also in the work of those eighteenth-century moralists (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith) opposed to naturalist and reductionist critiques of human agency, and uneasy with the overweening claims of a (science-based) epistemology as the sole legitimate intellectual framework for its description, it becomes apparent that the concepts themselves have grown opaque to their detractors and defenders alike. What Cora Diamond has identified as a “conceptual amnesia” of sorts is not simply a contingent predicament haunting eighteenth-century moral philosophy but in effect furnished the conditions under which that curiously de-contextualized and ultimately incoherent enterprise came to take shape. Much of what follows can thus be described as a comprehensive attempt to answer Diamond’s key questions: viz., “what kind of good a concept is, [and] what kind of loss it is to lose concepts?” Following the ground-breaking arguments by Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, Diamond suggests that, significant differences notwithstanding, both agree “that certain concepts require for their content or intelligibility background conditions which are no longer fulfilled.” Yet she also factors in Stanley Cavell’s objection that such a loss, were it to have taken place as definitively as Mac-Intyre’s After Virtue suggests, could logically no longer be experienced as “loss” at all. Rather, we “should have lost the very notion of morality itself.”
Diamond then raises the key question: if indeed we inhabit “a world in which the concept of morality is missing” and in which we appear bereft of “the capacity to recognize that it is missing, is this, as MacIntyre would have it, a true portrayal of our world, or is it, as Cavell suggests, a reflection of [our] blindness to what we still have?” Precisely here we find that a philosophy solely committed to a formal-syllogistic model of knowing—to what Husserl had called the truth of “correctness” in contradistinction to the truth of “disclosure”—will neither be in a position to register the fact of conceptual amnesia nor be able to articulate its significance. For “how you see the good of having particular concepts or kinds of concepts . . . depends on at least two things: first, your view of the relation between experience (taking that in a very broad sense) and thought . . . Second, how you see the good of having these or those concepts or kinds of word[s] depends on the significance you attach to thinking well about certain things.” Diamond’s insight that “the way you consider the values of modes of thought itself depends on your view of what thought is” seems fundamentally correct, even though she does not expressly connect it with the hermeneutic tradition to which it rather obviously pertains.22
This may be the point to address a question that may well have arisen in light of what has been said thus far: viz., whether the argument to be unfolded in this book is driven by an underlying sense of nostalgia. To address that question—likely to be raised about any account critical of the modern project—one should probably begin by clarifying what nostalgia is ordinarily taken to mean, and what its conceptual premises are. The longing for a past plenitude, as indeed the supposition that it had once existed, rests on two closely related assumptions: first, that historical time is linear rather than cyclical, monochrome in its forward motion rather than recursive and imbued with various kinds of “higher time” or spikes of semantic intensity. For it is this premise that sanctions the axiom of “loss” without which there could not be any nostalgic affect. Second, nostalgia implies that our relationship to the past is one of disaffection, even terminal estrangement, a premise borne out by the self-certifying affect of “longing” at the heart of nostalgia. Yet precisely these premises also show nostalgia to be a distinctively modern phenomenon inasmuch as it acquiesces in the modern (historicist) view of time as a monochrome vector pointing toward the future, which renders the past as strictly passé, that is, as sheer inventory to be, perhaps, objectively known but most definitely incapable of signifying for (let alone transforming) us. Yet as I argued in the previous chapter (“Forgetting by Remembering”), this underlying conception of history as a repository of expired meanings and outmoded practices, so strenuously opposed by the young Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History (1874), I take to be categorically inapposite, indeed positively inimical to genuine hermeneutic engagement of any kind.
In fact, in our engagement of intellectual traditions we should not let ourselves be forced into the false choice between a nostalgic and an agnostically “objective” stance. A more productive approach to humanistic inquiry and its discrete intellectual traditions, and the road followed in this book, is dialectical and agonistic in nature. It holds that the intellectual traditions of philosophical theology at the center of my argument only took shape in a struggle with radically materialist and reductionist accounts, such as in Plato’s ongoing disputes with the atomists and Sophists, Augustine’s various controversies with Manichean, Pelagian, and Donatian views, or Aquinas’s hard-won synthesis of Platonist, Aristotelian, and Augustinian positions. The fact that humanistic inquiry and the broadly speaking Platonic tradition from which it springs had only ever constituted itself in a prolonged and richly inflected struggle with the competing projects of naturalism and reductionism means that the retrieval attempted in the following pages is focused on the internal logic and underlying stakes of a prolonged debate, rather than of some self-contained, homogeneous, and monolithic tradition. It is for this reason, too, that the present argument accords a strong presence to voices strenuously opposed to the Platonic-Christian-humanist line of reasoning (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, and various other representatives of what Charles Taylor dubs the “school of natural indifference”).
At the same time, however, what follows is not (I hope) driven by a mere slogan such as “teach the conflict” by means of which literary studies of the early 1990s had sought to shore up its professional credit against growing evidence of that field’s conceptual incoherence. Like virtually every one of the writers engaged in this book (including those with whose premises and conclusions I find myself in sharp disagreement), I believe that reasoned inquiry not only does not preclude an inner commitment but, in fact, positively demands it. Hence, in tracing the conflict between a humanist and an emergent, hyper-naturalist and reductionist account of will, person, and closely associated concepts, I do not interpret their agonistic encounters in the course of Western intellectual history as prima facie evidence of some underlying “symmetry” or “equivalence.” In fact, in the case of Hobbes, I not only take his account of human agency to be extremely restrictive and limiting (which to me seems rather obvious) but also as vitiated by an internal, performative contradiction and therefore untrue. Yet to be committed to a particular view of things as having far greater truth value (or “antecedent probability”) is not eo ipso to indulge in a nostalgic outlook on the past any more than it betokens sheer subjective opinion or some milieu-specific prejudice. For one thing, in embracing a particular intellectual tradition, which in any event is a complex and shifting phenomenon, we do not thereby adopt some triumphalist view of intellectual history. In fact, it may well turn out that the substance of the Platonic-Christian-humanist model of will, person, action, judgment, and responsibility has been irretrievably misconstrued or by now lost outright. The resulting stance, then, would be not one of nostalgia but of lucid and articulate mourning, a perspective on history variously cultivated by writers of the Baroque (Andreas Gryphius, Pedro Calderon), Romanticism (Novalis, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff) all the way forward to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno in their alternately tragic, lyric, and critical idioms.
The bigger point at issue is that (pace Hegel) not all dialectical tension will issue in a productive outcome. Not every narrative can be deemed inherently “progressive” merely on account of its underlying dialectical organization. Moreover, the (often hidden) costs and the presumptive yield implied in Aufhebung cannot be authoritatively balanced from a perspective that is itself generated and circumscribed by Hegel’s dialectical narrative. We simply do not have at our disposal an independent point of view from which objectively to judge whether the recurrent confrontation between naturalist and Platonic legacies has truly advanced our thinking or, perhaps, left it impoverished—possibly to such an extent that (as Diamond argues) we are no longer consciously experiencing the loss in question and, hence, incapable of articulating its implications. Here, again, what accounts for the dilemma is the fact that merely being locked in a prolonged agon does not per se render the two frameworks equivalent or symmetrical. The dialectical movement or debate concerning the nature of the human that is being re-engaged in the following pages cannot be construed a priori as axiomatically progressive, generative, and beneficial except insofar as each of the competing views—crudely put, the Platonic-Christian and the naturalist/reductionist one—gains in sharpness, internal consistency, and force over time. Newman’s epigrammatic conclusion that, in the development of ideas, “to be perfect is to have changed often” (DCD, 40) only asserts that a qualitative improvement in our ability to apprehend the truth of the idea and, hence, in the degree of its “antecedent probability” has taken place. Newman does not, however, mean to reason us into a view of progress as an impersonal, systemic, and necessary “occurrence.” Rather than arising by means of syllogistic demonstration, the validity and realization of an idea is bound up with the Aristotelian category of “action” (praxis). It pivots on the degree of commitment and clarity with which we assent to its meaning and subsequently inhabit this “idea” in practice.
Hegelian dialectics fails to acknowledge the degree to which the truth of an idea can never be simply the product of a systemic process but, for its ultimate “realization” (Verwirklichung), will always depend on the “real assent” of the individual person. Hence it is that a strictly impersonal and procedural idea of reason will always struggle to defend itself against the heckling “it’s too soon to tell” with which Zhou Enlai in 1971 had famously responded to Henry Kissinger’s polite conversational opener regarding the “meaning of the French Revolution.” What the Chinese premier meant to suggest is not so much that we must patiently wait for the meaning of the past to disclose itself but, rather, that it is continually being determined by our active (revolutionary) engagement with its legacy. Hence, too, the logical possibility always remains that what Hegel envisions as so many instances of generative, “determinate negation” might be punctuated by cases in which distinct systems of thought will prove positively incommensurable. They might lack even the most elemental shared premises: for example, that will, judgment, choice, action, and responsibility are not merely notional or discursive but incontrovertibly real. Augustine’s contention that self-knowledge is not some epistemological hypothesis but an ontological datum may already take as a given what modern, hyper-naturalist accounts (e.g., Hobbes, Hume) just as emphatically contest.23 If so, dialectics furnishes us not so much with a linear progress narrative as with a complex history of misconstruals and misunderstandings.
Like Augustine or, much later, Newman and Gadamer, I do indeed believe that the proper point of departure for hermeneutic inquiry is not some instance of objective certainty or “first principle” to be syllogistically proven and conveyed in propositional form. The motional gesture of “understanding,” as Gadamer frequently stresses, is not one of coercion but play, not an inexorable sequence of logical steps but a series of recognitions (or, as the case may be, misprisions) such as characterize all genuine “conversation” (Gespräch). Humanistic inquiry thus begins with a moment of certitude, a “view” (Newman’s term again) to the elucidation of which we take ourselves to be committed, it being understood that the quest for clarifying that view is one of unceasing dialogue and learning and, as such, destined to transform and, hopefully, deepen the view that first prompted it. In the case of this study, its underlying “view” might bear reformulating thus: philosophies that peremptorily exclude all questions of value, commitment, and final causes—for example, modern science-derived epistemologies, reductionist accounts of mind, or the logical minimalism of much analytic philosophy—are by and large incapable of correlating thought and existence, life and action, for they only attend to the propositional structure of our locutions insofar as these seem to lead (with seemingly efficient and inexorable causality) to some kind of “outcome.” And yet, from Plato to Augustine, Aquinas, Shaftesbury, Coleridge, and Newman, it is not the seamless conjunction of our locutions and actions but our insight into their persistent asymmetry and frequent collision that has yielded the most significant and capacious descriptions of human agency: “The words in which one thinks about one’s life and actions do not themselves go to make the moral character of what one does. The philosophy of mind leads to a separation between what a person is like, where that is tied to his style of thought, and his capacities as a moral agent.” The dominance of analytic models of philosophy in the twentieth century thus has at least partially deprived us of grasping the primacy of practical reason and the inescapability of judgment and value as integral components of human cognition: “Disagreement about the significance of the loss of the earlier notion depends on seeing the possibility of the loss, but the possibility itself may be invisible to us.”24
For humanistic inquiry to grasp and articulate that dissonance, it must recognize both the primacy of practical reason over theoretical inquiry and the myriad ways in which its key concepts are saturated with an often conflicting array of historical usages and valuations. Like Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor, I believe that what has occurred is a de facto loss of a differentiated and historically informed moral conception, and that the result has been a growing inarticulacy within humanistic inquiry and indeed the public sphere broadly speaking, which has rendered modern theories of agency and practical reason increasingly marginal and often incoherent. At the same time, a long historical perspective such as this book seeks to develop shows challenges to practical reason, a responsible will, and the uniqueness and incommunicability of the human person to have always been with us. From Protagoras through Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, next resurfacing in the extreme voluntarism and irrationalism of the late nominalists (Gabriel Biel, Nicholas of Autrecourt), and taken to their logical conclusion in the mechanistic and determinist theories of mind spawned by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Hartley, Priestley, and Schopenhauer—there is ample evidence of a competing, naturalist, and reductionist outlook. Contesting the human as a unique phenomenon distinguished from all other forms of life by practical rationality and an indelible awareness of moral obligation toward other persons, these thinkers not only prove radically at odds with Platonic, Augustinian, and Thomist thought as regards its premises and conclusions, but their very methods and culture of argument prove incommensurable with humanistic frameworks of any kind. In the early twentieth century, building on Gottlob Frege’s pioneering critique of introspection, the anti-humanist strain diversifies considerably, such as in ordinary language philosophy, philosophy of mind (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, et al.), modern behaviorism and, most recently, contemporary neuro-scientific accounts of “mind.”
Indeed, it seems clear that, very much along the lines suggested by Newman and Gadamer, the conception of human agency evolved dialectically, taking shape and acquiring depth precisely through its ongoing engagement with competing accounts. For that reason, Murdoch’s subtly hopeful characterization of conceptual amnesia seems fundamentally right: “the conceptual losses we have indeed suffered have not [at least not yet] actually changed us into human beings limited to the interests and experiences and moral possibilities we can express in our depleted vocabulary.”25 If anything, then, it is my hope that the present argument will help clarify why a deep historical awareness of key concepts is a desideratum, and why its sweeping displacement by (or naïve assimilation to) neuro-scientific and informational methodologies is bound to render humanistic inquiry stunted, inarticulate, and ultimately obsolete.
Finally, let me offer a brief word on the selection of writers whose arguments will be sifted in what follows. While many of the authors and texts explored here are canonical, it was not their widely acknowledged prominence but the particular force and exemplary (or symptomatic) nature of their arguments that made them compelling choices. This is particularly true as regards the evolving conception of the will, from its initial, oblique emergence in Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus all the way through to its sudden displacement or elision in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, which—reacting to Hobbes’s momentous, not to say disastrous premises and deductions—eclipses the cognitive and ethical dimensions of voluntas by abruptly recasting questions of will in terms of seemingly non-cognitive and mechanical “passions.” Arguably, there is less discretion as regards selecting representative figures when exploring the concept of person. For as soon as the legal and dramatic connotations of prosōpon and persona have been taken up into early Christian theology (by the Cappadocian fathers, Augustine, and Boethius), a highly self-conscious, indeed canonical tradition of voices is established that subsequent writers such as Richard of St. Victor or Aquinas recognize as the inevitable point of departure and guiding framework for further reflections on personhood and agency.
The great exception in all of this is Coleridge. Long suspicious of modernity’s indifference to the complexity, inner dynamism, and historical depth of basic humanistic conceptions, Coleridge around 1808 embarks on a quest of singular, indeed impossible ambition. Significantly inspired by Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and other Cambridge Platonists, he attempts to oppose the hegemony of modern naturalist and reductionist methods of argument (in philosophy, theology, social theory, and political theory) by rebuilding a comprehensive Platonic-Christian archive of the history of key humanistic conceptions: viz., will, person, action, responsibility, obligation, conscience, and judgment. Through patient, albeit forcefully urged close readings, Coleridge means to impress on his readers that—far from having emancipated itself from premodern conceptions of human agency and responsibility—modernity had substantially failed to comprehend what it dismissed as “premodern” notions. For Coleridge, it is this principled and unilateral refusal to engage intellectual traditions that accounts for the conceptual flatness and, ultimately, ethical lapse of modern thought since Hobbes and Locke. Needless to say, Coleridge’s extraordinary intellectual ambitions were profoundly at cross-purposes with his mercurial and irresolute personality. As a result, the often enigmatic presentation of his critique, to say nothing of his oeuvre’s vexing incompleteness, limited its impact and largely prevented most of his alternately puzzled or bemused Victorian readers from apprehending the depth, scope, and intellectual rigor of his late philosophical theology.
Yet his unparalleled range of reading in premodern writers was not the only deterrent; for what perplexed his intellectual heirs was Coleridge’s distinctive critique of modern instrumental reason’s insidious and corrosive effect on what he regarded as an unconditional truth: viz., that all human agency originates in and remains circumscribed by an ethic of interpersonal relations and obligations. Unlike the more familiar voices of political reaction or religious nostalgia (Joseph de Maistre, François-René de Chateaubriand, Adam Müller, the late Friedrich Schelling, et al.), Coleridge’s ethical and religious philosophy overleaps his entire century, with the partial exception of Newman. Thus his ontology of human conscience and the primacy of the I-Thou relation in constituting personhood not only harkens back to early Christian theology but also bears (up to a point) striking affinities to the anti-systematic strand of twentieth-century Jewish philosophical theology as we encounter it in Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. In the end, Coleridge’s great insight—cryptically anticipated in the so-called “Conversation Poems” of his early years—was that modernity’s strictly epistemological approach to questions of human agency and responsibility was doomed to fail simply because it had no theory of a “Thou” but only ever juxtaposed the ego or cogito to some impersonal he, she, or it.
Inevitably, any attempt at mapping complex and extensive intellectual genealogies, no matter how ambitious, will remain an incomplete and often unsatisfactory undertaking. Other figures and seminal texts—Luther’s “The Bondage of the Will”; Kant’s moral philosophy; or Hegel’s parsing of volition, intention, purpose, etc. in Part II (“Morality”) of his Philosophy of Right, for example—would certainly have warranted inclusion. Specifically Kant’s conception of will and moral agency may strike readers as a culpable omission; yet the complexity of Kant’s arguments (briefly alluded to at the opening of Part III, below), his uniquely ambivalent role within modern political liberalism, as well the vast number of competing interpretations that have accrued around his practical philosophy just in the last couple of decades would altogether have exceeded the limits of an argument that is committed to close textual analysis as its principal method. To be sure, other accounts of modernity have settled for different strategies of presentation, being either more allusive in their treatment of large patterns (Charles Taylor, Hans Blumenberg, Louis Dupré) or, alternatively, settling for a largely non-argumentative, quasi-encyclopedic presentation of its major players (Jerome Schneewind on the Invention of Autonomy). Yet such approaches, too, have their risks, seeing as they present us either with a strong argument but potentially insufficient evidence to clinch it, or with an abundance of proof for an account whose relevance to our own historical moment risks never quite coming into focus. Whatever its shortcomings (and they may be many), what follows seeks to argue a single, perhaps polemical thesis (rather than offering a detached scholarly survey): viz., that absent a sustained, comprehensive, and evolving critical engagement with the history of its key concepts of human agency (will, person, judgment, teleology), humanistic inquiry will not only find itself increasingly marginalized in the modern university, but will eventually discover itself to have been the principal agent of its own undoing.
1. Truth and Method, 283, 293–294.
2. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 95.
3. Ibid., 142–143.
4. For Kant’s notion of “regulative” or “heuristic” principles,” see Critique of Pure Reason, esp. A509ff. and A616f. On the Gadamer-Habermas debate, see bibliographical entries for both authors below. On that exchange, see Mendelson, “Habermas-Gadamer Debate”; Rauch, Hieroglyph of Tradition, 151–178; and Scheibler, Gadamer, 9–70.
5. Newman, Development, 33 (henceforth cited parenthetically as DCD); for discussions of Newman’s Essay, see Carr, Newman & Gadamer, 111–131; Lash, Newman on Development; and, arguably the most compelling account of Newman’s anti-liberalism and intellectual persona, Pattison, Great Dissent.
6. Both Lash and Carr identify “the tension between this transformative pressure history exerts upon Christian ideas and the Catholic belief in the immutability of dogma” as the basso continuo of Newman’s entire career (Carr, Newman & Gadamer, 115); for Lash, the Platonism behind Newman’s “idea” is that of the Alexandrian fathers, and that the Essay’s “‘progressive’ view of the history of Christianity . . . is untypical; much depends on whether Newman can demonstrate the ‘comparability of terms’ in the development of the idea of Christianity—something the Essay tackles in the first of its Notes on Development, on the ‘Preservation of Type’ [DCD, 171–178]” (Newman on Development, 59).
7. Origins, 35–36.
8. Carr, Newman & Gadamer, 91, 96.
9. Jameson, Postmodernism, 368; see also Eagleton’s review of Fish, Professional Correctness (“Death of Self-Criticism”).
10. Curiously, Newman himself would late in his career have to defend himself against the charge of skepticism, as leveled against him by Andrew M. Fairbairn in an article entitled “Catholicism and Modern Thought.” Newman’s reply in the subsequent issue of the journal emphasized that in limiting reason to strictly probabilistic conclusions he had availed himself of a colloquial understanding of reason. On this debate, see Richardson, Newman’s Approach, 99.
11. DCD, 38; echoing Newman almost verbatim, Buckley views history as a “demonstration” of ideas, their varying plausibility, the soundness (or lack thereof) of their premises and entailments, and their adversarial relation with other conceptions; and he concludes that precisely “for these reasons, the history of theological ideas is not external to theology, but an essential moment within it” (Origins, 334–335).
12. Regarding affinities between Newman’s theory of development and Darwin’s theory of evolution, see Pattison, Great Dissent, 194–196; Ker, Newman, 300; on Newman’s theory as such, see Lash, Newman on Development, 46–79; “Literature and Theory,” and Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 96–119. For background on the writing of Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine, see Ker, Newman, 257–315; on Newman’s theory of development in relation to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, see Carr, Newman & Gadamer, esp. 89–150.
13. Pattison, Great Dissent, 53; for Pattison, it is not in spite but because of his “comprehensive failure” that Newman was able to emerge as “a lone voice standing outside the first principles of the whole age . . . whose counterpart in intellectual history is not Carlyle or Arnold so much as Nietzsche.”
14. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 135; Gunton quotes M. Polanyi, who characterizes his great work (Personal Knowledge) as an attempt “to achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I believe to be true, even though I know that it might conceivably be false.”
15. From Bossuet to Newman, 98; Pattison, Great Dissent, 5; see also Lash, Newman on Development, 61–62; in both instances, Lash concurs with Chadwick. Prior to F. L. Cross’s 1933 essay (“Newman and the Development of Doctrine”) vituperative accounts of Newman as a closet ultramontane ideologue masquerading as a German historicist (or vice versa) tended to be widespread; notably, Newman’s adversaries seemed divided on whether his position amounted to “German infidelity communicated in the music and perfume of St. Peters” (as James Mozley had put it), or whether “the ultra-liberal theory of Christianity” was to conceal his “join[ing] the Church of Rome” (quoted in Carr, Newman & Gadamer, 112). For his part, Lash views Newman’s theory of development as genuinely “influenced by the continental school of history”—albeit less by Hegel and Comte than by the Catholic Johann Sebastian Drey—leader of the Tübingen theological seminary, whose 1819 Introduction to the Study of Theology and a newly founded journal (Theologische Quartalschrift) of the same year “were marked by the spirit of Roman Catholic liberalism” and aimed at “the restatement of Catholicism with the aid of the new historical and critical and philosophical instruments” (Newman on Development, 108).
16. Arguably, Newman’s conception of probability vacillates between a premodern and a modern one, an ambiguity liable to complicate his theory of development. For Milbank, “Newman seems un-alert to the radical distinction between a premodern sense of the probable as involving a kind of ineffable intuition which approximates to an unreachable truth, and a modern sense of the probable as concerning a calculable approximation to certainty” (“What is Living and What is Dead,” 51); alternatively, one might read Newman here equivocating on an intractable theoretical issue, something he frequently does.
17. Lash remarks that Newman’s preoccupation with the problem of continuity, though “more easily handled in a ‘linear’ perspective”) nonetheless has him approach the issue “episodically.” Like Darwin’s “punctuated equilibrium,” Newman’s vision of development involves a fundamentally irregular series of uneventful periods interrupted by spikes of intense and momentous controversy and change; see Lash, Newman on Development, 57–60. It ought to be pointed out that “natural selection,” not “evolution,” is where Newman’s and Darwin’s account of development converge; in fact, Étienne Gilson notes that “the word [‘evolution’] is to be met with nowhere, either in the first edition (1859) nor in any of the subsequent editions until the sixth” of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, and that the term’s eventual attribution to Darwin is largely the result of misidentifying Herbert Spencer’s views with those of Darwin, a fusion that was made as it were “official” in the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the entry on “Evolution” (From Aristotle to Darwin, 58, 86).
18. In marked contrast with classical or quadratic notions of form-as-architecture, Newman’s model of development is essentially one of transformation, metamorphosis, or the type of postclassical, “open” variational form that we encounter in Beethoven’s late quartets. Lash thus characterizes Newman’s intellectual style as a type of “fugal writing,” that is, as deploying “literary (or ‘real’) as distinct from ‘theoretical’ (or ‘notional’) patterns of argument.” For a fuller discussion of the retrieval of Aristotelian entelecheia in Romantic notions of organic form, and of the persistence of such models in contemporary aesthetics and biology, see Pfau, “All is Leaf.”
19. Fifteen Sermons, 200.
20. That, of course, was to be Nietzsche’s famously anti-teleological polemic in the Genealogy of Morals: “there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put, its actual application and integration into a system of goals . . . The entire history of a ‘thing,’ an organ, a custom may take the form of an extended chain of signs, of ever-new interpretations and manipulations, whose causes do not themselves necessarily stand in relation to one another, but merely follow and replace one another arbitrarily and according to circumstance. The ‘development’ of a thing, a custom, an organ does not in the least resemble a progressus towards a goal . . . Rather, this development assumes the form of the succession of the more or less far-reaching, more or less independent processes of overpowering which affect it—including also in each case the resistance marshaled against these processes, the changes of form attempted with a view to defence and reaction, and the results of these successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ even more so” (Genealogy of Morals, 57–58 [Pt. II, §12]).
21. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5:xi. Buckley, Origins, 14; striking intellectual affinities between Buckley’s project and that of Gadamer (both of which bear strong affinities to Newman’s theory of development) emerge when, late in his book, Buckley describes his project as “tracing the historical logic of [theological] concepts.” He goes on to insist that “attention to the historical experience of theological ideas, the consciousness of their intellectual roots, growth, and full flower, constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for their assessment . . . Tracing out the entailments of ideas and charting the influence of the forms in which they are proposed exhibits their fullness of meaning and the capacities conferred upon them by the modes in which they are specified” (ibid., 334–335).
22. “Losing Your Concepts,” 255, 256, 260, 269–270 (italics mine).
23. “Let the mind then not go looking for a look at itself as if it were absent, but rather take pains to tell itself apart as present. Let it not try to learn itself as if it did not know itself, but rather to discern itself from what it knows to be other” (ADT, 10.12).
24. Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” 271–272.
25. Ibid., 263; Diamond subsequently claims to disagree with Murdoch insofar as for the latter “the failure of contemporary moral philosophy . . . rests on inadequacies in philosophy of mind,” whereas for Diamond it is an “underlying inadequacy in a philosophical view of language that ties description to classification.” Yet that disagreement seems somewhat contrived, since Murdoch herself also registers strong criticisms regarding Frege’s view of language, in particular, its tendency to “make invisible the character of the difference between the concepts member of the species Homo sapiens and human being” (ibid., 266).