GOOD OR COMMODITY?
Modern Knowledge and the Loss of Eudaimonia
The strain of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and philosophical narrative briefly indexed here reveals a metaphysical deficit intrinsic to modern liberalism—a deficit certainly unacknowledged, if not outright repressed, and hence steadily more pressing and crippling for the modern individual. The writings in question show the Enlightenment unable to grasp the challenge posed by freedom to its self-satisfied, rationalist trade in non-negotiable and non-contingent “rights” and its reductive understanding of free will as multiple choice and subjective preference. In scrutinizing these structural problems, nineteenth-century literary and philosophical narrative appears wary of liberalism’s founding paradigm of agency; the hypothesis of institutionally embedded and ostensibly self-possessed individuals carrying out the work of reason behaviorally, rather than by way of imaginative, transformative, and risk-fraught action, no longer seems inspiring, let alone credible in the way it had been for Locke, Adam Smith, and Kant. Yet the emergent critique of Enlightenment liberalism comes with presuppositions of its own. Thus Schopenhauer’s contemptuous view of the modern rational and self-possessed individual—a critique whose political dimensions Edmund Burke’s Reflections had anticipated with cantankerous lucidity—can only reject modern autonomy by viewing the primacy of character, temperament, and sensibility as continuous with ancient Greek notions of “necessity” (anankē) and “fate” (tuchē). Against modern liberalism’s axiomatic view of a world composed of so many autonomous monads that take themselves to be free to join various social, political, religious, and economic communities and associations, Schopenhauer’s dystopic account (presaging similar narratives in Stendhal, Flaubert, Wagner, and Dostoevsky) insists that it is only at the level of action that the status of the modern individual is decided. As Schopenhauer goes on to argue, the course of action that the modern self “chooses” is the only one she or he could ever have chosen (mere “wishing” being an entirely different matter); and in now embarking on it the individual can only give rise to the (tragic) self-awareness of an implacable and irretrievable determinacy. If liberalism’s public face is to be seen in the literary genre of utopia, its unacknowledged Blakean “contrary” is tragedy; and it is no accident that tragedy should have furnished the generic template for the canonical narratives oeuvre of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Fontane, Hardy, Zola, or Thomas Mann.
For Blake, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Flaubert, Arnold, Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, among others, freedom is a challenge to our capacities for imaginative vision rather than a formal possession or claim right. Yet it is a challenge that their characters rarely tend to meet successfully—some happy exceptions such as Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin and Pjotr Bezuhov or Eliot’s Daniel Deronda notwithstanding. Instead, the vast majority of nineteenth-century narratives exhibit a marked disillusionment with modern liberalism’s stubborn contrivance of various descriptive and disciplinary procedures, techniques, and systems (e.g., statistics, behaviorism, utilitarianism, quantitative sociology, historicism) aimed at remedying the deleterious effects of the hedonistic, radically singular self that was the epistemological legacy of Hobbesian voluntarism and Lockean nominalism. A great deal of nineteenth-century narrative thus scrutinizes the autonomous individual’s repeated failure to achieve a concept or vision of the whole and, especially, of the human other as a “Thou.” Behind this failure lurks a story that, so we are given to understand, should never have unfolded in the first place. The basic blueprint in question—encountered in the fiction of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Fontane, Mann, and numerous others besides—thus reoccupies, however unwittingly, the ancient motif of a world whose material realization inevitably betrays the idea that had given rise to it. Implicitly, then, even as the dystopic arc of modern narrative traces the local failings of specific characters, it also amounts to a symptom of modernity’s fateful cultivation of theoretical reason at the expense of practical reason, of affirming singularity over relation, prioritizing self-assertion over obligation, will over meaning, and generally sacrificing vision and participation in what is given to the idol of knowledge as power (potestas) and commodity (dominium). Hans Blumenberg puts the matter as follows:
The fundamental Platonic equivocation, that the world of appearance is indeed the reproduced image of Ideas but cannot attain the perfection of the original, is resolved by Neoplatonism in favor of the second aspect: The world appears as the great failure to equal its ideal model. The metaphysical factor in this failure has been prescribed since Plato; it is the hylē [matter]. The difference between idea and substratum, between form and stuff, is increased in the Neoplatonic systems; to the theologizing of the Idea corresponds the demonizing of matter. What could at one time be conceived as the subjection of necessity to rational persuasion, namely, the formation of the world, is now the confinement of the world soul in the womb—or better: the prison—of matter . . . All of this is still within the realm of discourse laid out by Plato, even if it does, as it were, exaggerate the metaphysical “distances” in the original ground plan . . . Gnosticism bears a more radical stamp. Even though it employs the Neoplatonist system, it nevertheless is not a consistent extension of that system but rather a reoccupation [Umbesetzung] of its positions. The demiurge has become the principle of badness, the opponent of the transcendent God of salvation who has nothing to do with bringing this world into existence. The world is the labyrinth of the pneuma [spirit] gone astray; as cosmos, it is the order opposed to salvation, the system of a fall . . . The downfall of the world becomes the critical process of final salvation, the dissolution of the demiurge’s illegitimate creation. (LMA, 128)
For a recent illustration of this predicament, one may turn to Ian McEwan’s 1998 novel Amsterdam where, early in the narrative, protagonist and celebrity composer Clive Linley finds himself taking refuge from his comfortable upper-class West London flat and its predictable array of “design, cuisine, good wine, and the like.” Seeking shelter from professional troubles within the poetically charged ambience of the Lake District, Clive first has to endure the passage by train out of North London, a transition that deepens his Gnostic sense of human civilization as an all-encompassing miscarriage. Languidly taking in “square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic,” Clive gradually distills all the inchoate perceptions into a comprehensive, dismal allegory. What makes his desultory musings so poignant is, at least in part, their completely unpre-meditated character, which so markedly contrasts with the strict means/end rationality governing and visibly misshaping the bustle of economic life without—at once utterly structured and yet entirely devoid of self-awareness:
It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.1
Intriguing about the passage is its emphasis on the particularity of quotidian life, the frenetic cycles of getting and spending and the consequent denaturing of purposive organic forms into mere vestiges of natural creation (“a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees”). A veritable allegory of late modern capitalism run amok, the wasteland of North London impresses on Clive “the human project” itself as an impossible one. And yet, by inadvertently echoing a key axiom of ancient Gnostic speculation, Clive’s sense of the material world as a cosmic misadventure (“a mistake from the very beginning”) also perplexes. For not only should this world, by all appearances, never have been in the first place; but the fact of its manifest persistence in spite of it all raises the question as to what value there might be left for speculative thinking in a world that has embraced instrumental rationality without reserve. Though likely unaware that his weary meditations retrace Gnostic speculations almost two thousand years old, McEwan’s protagonist, quietly dismayed by what he beholds, nonetheless conveys the undiminished force and urgency of Gnostic speculation. What if beneath our self-conscious, post-historical modernity there were to ferment another set of questions, not only distinct from but in actual conflict with what Nietzsche had labeled modernity’s “logical optimism”? What if our single-minded embrace of rationality as the efficient, specialized, and institutional/corporate production of knowledge were to have obscured an entirely other dimension of reason? It is the task and privilege of literature and “criticism” in the strong (i.e., extra-professional) sense to pose and explore questions of exactly the kind so vicariously broached by McEwan’s dispirited hero.
In what follows, a first exhibit of Coleridge’s thoroughgoing critique of modernity will be The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which intones concerns that, decades later, he was to explore with unprecedented rigor and intensity in his Aids to Reflection, the Opus Maximum, and the notebooks. Yet before taking up these materials, some broader and perplexing questions have to be addressed first. For any critical assessment of Coleridge’s perspective on modernity as a metaphysical catastrophe (rather than a set of contingent political problems) is complicated by our own situation today. To begin with, as active members of a profession committed to and/or embedded in various disciplinary and institutional pursuits and practices, we ourselves are potentially symptoms of the very modernity that Coleridge found so perturbing. First and foremost, there is the apparent fragmentation of knowledge into so many discrete institutional and disciplinary sub-specializations and, along with it, the dominance of method for which Bacon, Descartes, and Newton had significantly paved the way. As Giambattista Vico, Blake, Coleridge, Goethe, and Schopenhauer, among others, saw it, the gradual extension of modernity’s analytic and methodical conception of “science” to all areas of knowledge risks fragmenting the world as a whole, to the point that the resulting, utterly particular insight is all but certain to have eroded the human and spiritual significance of the knowledge so obtained. In Coleridge’s own times, the most conspicuous instance of methodical, specialized, and institutionally framed knowledge involved a historicism that pervades the emergent disciplines of higher biblical criticism (Christian Gottlob Heyne, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Friedrich Schleiermacher, et al.), historical philology (Herder, Lord Monboddo, Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Wilhelm von Humboldt, et al.), and literary history (Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, Wolfgang Menzel, Heinrich Heine, et al.), and post-Kantian aesthetics (Schelling, Schiller, Hegel). Rapidly establishing itself as the very embodiment of “method,” historicism also transforms philosophy itself, such that, after Kant, its paradigm of rationality (a.k.a. logic) begins to edge away from a syllogistic, predicative conception of truth and a methodology largely steeped in demonstration by analogy (more geometrico). In its place, the early 1800s witness the emergence of an inherently dynamic, temporalized, or “liquefied” (Hegel’s expression) paradigm of truth as its own movement (Bewegung). Charting the conversion of “substance into subject,” the speculative idealism and dialectical materialism of Schelling, Hegel, and Marx recast knowledge as a necessarily trans-generational, historicist progression.2
In aligning a reductionist understanding of method with an increasingly professionalized and specialized model of discipline-specific knowledge, the Enlightenment’s scientific and epistemological projects revive (however unwittingly) a nominalism first pioneered by Abelard and William of Ockham. For to make an a priori commitment to historicism as a “method” almost inevitably sets inquiry on a course toward increasing specialization and professionalization such as will inexorably shrink the community for which one’s “findings” can have any relevance at all. I say “findings,” rather than “arguments,” because implicit in Descartes’s insistence on the primacy of “method” is the assumption that what legitimates argument is solely the impersonal process by which it is generated; hence, the success of an argument should owe nothing to the rhetorical charisma of its presentation and everything to the methodology that secures the evidence on which modern scientific insight is said to rest. Implicitly, then, the charismatic and necessarily contingent force of rhetorical “argument” is steadily supplanted by the projection of an intersubjective consensus of expert knowledge of what in the final analysis would have to be, literally, “self-evident.” Modernity’s gradual journey from Cartesian rationalism to Lockean empiricism to nineteenth-century positivism thus revives the nominalist creed (at once irrefutable and pointless) that reality consists only of individual things. It is a position that reverberates in nineteenth-century historicism’s conception of knowledge as the methodical disaggregation of proper names, dates, locales.3
For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment broadly speaking thus amounts to “a nominalist movement” destined to lead its adherents to the threshold of an extreme particularity: “the nomen, the exclusive, precisely tailored concept, the proper name [dem umfanglosen, punktuellen Begriff, dem Eigennamen].” However dissimilar in their expressive registers, both the proper name and the nominalist concept employ the same strategy of self-legitimation inasmuch as they seek to render intelligible (and so redeem) the matter of history by recasting it as something as yet insufficiently differentiated. For a radically empiricist method “the guarantee of salvation lies in the rejection of any belief that would replace it: it is knowledge obtained in the denunciation of illusion . . . [and] the contesting of every positive without distinction.”4 In premising its disciplinary, institutional, and accumulative paradigm of inquiry on an axiomatic and seemingly paranoid suspicion of the world as something given by a conceivably deceptive creator (Descartes’s dieu trompeur), modernity—certainly by the beginning of the seventeenth century—has effectively abandoned the ancient (Platonic) view of knowledge as the convergence of theoria and eudaemonia. Knowledge now is construed as necessarily, indeed compulsively counterintuitive; it opposes the sheer givenness of phenomena, just as it rejects the metaphysical (in origin Augustinian) conception of the world as a gift. Insisting on the value-neutral and inherently unfinished nature of the material world, the modern, interventionist stance also disavows the ancient, both Stoic and Christian idea of knowledge as theoria and as vita contemplativa. Speaking of this “most momentous . . . reversal of the hierarchical order between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa,” Hannah Arendt elaborates: “the point was not that truth and knowledge were no longer important, but that they could be won only by ‘action’ and not by contemplation . . . The reasons for trusting doing and for distrusting contemplation or observation became more cogent after the results of the first active inquiries.” One must not misconstrue this reversal—achieved above all with the help of instruments and, especially, the paradigm of “mathematical knowledge, where we deal only with self-made entities of the mind”—as simply “raising doing to the rank of contemplation as the highest state of which human beings are capable.” For as the “handmaiden of doing,” all active thinking and its implicit vision of discrete knowledges moving toward a mathesis universalis effectively eclipsed the value of contemplation altogether (HC, 289–291).
In its classical, Platonic, and (modified) Aristotelian sense, theoria had constituted an essentially individual and contemplative relation to the cosmos, one notably accompanied by a sense of wonder (thaumazein) for whose continued interpretation Socratic dialogue and Platonic dialectics were thought to furnish the most promising form. Implicitly, the classical notion of theoria also posited that “truth in its totality was at the disposition of the individual” and, as a further consequence, that there had to be a strong “association of eudemonia with theory” (LMA, 239). Beginning with the Socratic emphasis on self-knowledge, the therapeutic conception of Hellenistic thought (e.g., the ataraxia of the Stoics), as well as St. Augustine’s qualified and Tertullian’s more emphatic restriction of knowledge to matters concerning salvation, the pursuit of theory is framed by “the general suspicion that the temptation to know the material world risks the loss of one’s soul.”5
By contrast, what Jürgen Mittelstrass calls modernity’s “reflected” or self-conscious model of “theoretical curiosity” no longer unfolds as the humanistic care of the self, just as it is no longer circumscribed by a sense of metaphysical humility. Furthermore, it harbors no expectation of “wonder,” such as would imply some impending, all-consuming revelation. Instead, modern theory is forever fixated on the “never ending question of what will come next.”6 Hence, as Adorno and Horkheimer note with reference to Galileo, Bacon, and Leibniz, “number became the canon of Enlightenment” broadly speaking, such that “the Galilean mathematization of the world” dissolves the identity of objects into “a world of idealities” ultimately bound to supplant nature’s material processes with “a rational, systematically unified method . . . a process of infinite progression.”7 This accumulative or “encyclopedic” impulse accounts for and defines the institutional, professional, and corporate structure of modern intellectual work where “thought inevitably becomes a commodity” that seems “blindly pragmatized.”8 At his most vituperative, Coleridge conjures the nightmare scenario where “Education . . . [is] defined as synonimous with Instruction,” where “the population [is] mechanized into engines for the manufactory of new rich men,” and where knowledge has been reduced to individuals engorged with “Idealess facts, misnamed proofs from history, grounds of experience, &c., substituted for principles and the insight derived from them.” All this, he imagines is to be wrought by so-called “State-policy, a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of the head” (CCS, 62–63, 66). If the blind and overweening pragmatism shaping early Victorian educational policy already warranted such an unflattering portrayal, there is reason to suspect that it has returned in full force at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as utilitarian imperatives are incessantly couched in the equally smooth and vapid administrative jargon of “interactivity,” “technology-based learning,” “problem solving,” “learning outcomes,” and, of course, the incessant drumbeat of “globalization” and “interdisciplinarity.”
For some time now the paradigm of knowledge as a specialized commodity has meant that the resulting spectrum of information “can no longer be surveyed and taken in all at once.” Consequently, it had to be reframed in the form of subfields and new disciplines, what Mittelstrass calls “higher-level agencies [Übersubjekte],” the result being that the modern producer of knowledge is confronted by an ever increasing and vexing “disproportion between what has been achieved in the way of theoretical insight into reality and what can be transmitted to the individual for his use in orienting himself in his world.”9 A crucial consequence arising from the triumph of modern “theoretical curiosity” is the superior authority accorded to specialization. Not only does specialization imply the displacement of the classical, eudaimonistic understanding of theoria, it also favors a conception of knowledge as the aggregation of a potentially infinite number of spatiotemporally distinct facts or events. In its principled rejection of universals and the proposition that knowledge ought to be relevant to its individual practitioners, modern, disciplinary, specialized, and methodical inquiry necessarily favors a particularist ideal of knowledge that was to find its consummate expression in the new historicism of the 1980s. And yet, even as this reflexive historicism rejects the grand narrative aspirations of nineteenth-century Historismus in favor of tightly circumscribed micro-analyses, its quest for what Alan Liu has termed “local transcendence” rests on largely unexamined ideological commitments of its own. At issue are a small number of axioms concerning the projected benefits of an accumulative (not to say transactional) mode of scholarly production which (with admittedly polemical intent) may be identified as follows:
1. The Axiom of Specialization: that specialized research and the recovery of previously “overlooked” materials and sources shall produce a type of knowledge whose legitimacy and significance are taken to be sufficiently guaranteed by the methodological protocols governing the retrieval of the information in question. For our purposes, the most salient example of this outlook involves the assumption—spawned by Lockean nominalism—that “‘morality’ names a distinct subject matter, to be studied and understood in its own terms,” that it has no reality independent of the contingent history of its acquisition by a given individual and, hence, is contingent on the modern self’s fluctuating “psychological development.” As a result, morality is “apprehended . . . as a set of premises rather than a conclusion” and, thus, subject to the kind of historical, encyclopedic survey that Alasdair MacIntyre finds supremely realized in Henry Sidgwick’s contribution on “Ethics” to the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.10 Grasping the specious reasoning that had turned morality into the separate academic precinct of Richard Whately’s and Sidgwick’s “ethical science,” the young Gerard Manley Hopkins formulates the key question ever so succinctly: “in reality the discussion comes to this—Is virtue knowledge or a knowledge?” Behind that question stands Hopkins’s Socratic distrust of a knowledge so discrete and specialized in its focus and claims as to prove all but incommunicable.11
2. The Axiom of Contextualism, or the Encyclopedic Imperative: that the “new” materials so recovered largely imply their own causal and argumentative force simply by being exhaustively aggregated and associated with a specific “field” of inquiry whose substance and coherence are either presupposed outright or simply inferred from the interpretive community of specialists currently husbanding it.
3. The Axiom of Skepticism: that knowledge, being supposedly incompatible with strong normative and practical commitments of any kind, is inherently skeptical and impersonal; that it amounts to a form of “critique” in the Kantian, jurisdictional sense of delimiting the scope and authority of specific concepts, ideas, and beliefs; and that, consequently, the legitimacy of knowledge hinges on the inward cultivation and professional display of impartiality, distance, detachment, as well as on the express disavowal of any intuitive engagement with (or participation in) the phenomena under investigation.12
4. The Axiom of (Marketplace) Pluralism, or the Ethos of Principled Indifference: that the “objects” of knowledge have reality independent of any question regarding the ends of knowledge. Thus a professionalized and typically historicist procedure, especially in the humanities, embarks on the primitive accumulation and study of any number of discrete (and peremptorily disaggregated) texts on the assumption that critical knowledge will spontaneously arise from the open-market interaction of multiple and (presumptively) equivalent perspectives. Given that “contemporary academic practice [is provided] with only a weakly conceived rationality” whose discrete points of view prove “each unable . . . to provide conclusive refutations of its rivals,” the modern, professionalized conception of knowledge (including humanistic inquiry) has become axiomatically quarantined from questions of value.13
5. The Axiom of Knowledge as Emancipation, or the Ethos of Retroactive Liberation: that an institutional, professional, and transactional mode of humanistic and social-science inquiry advances modernity’s axiomatic and unimpeachable narrative of progress by liberating, bit by bit, historical meanings from their alleged entrapment in religious or ideological norms and values of the past and, thereby, will restore for us their temporarily “missed,” yet always “intended” authentic (secular) core.14
6. The Axiom of Critique as a Guarantor of Historical Progress: that the transactionalism of modern, institutional knowledge effects a teleological progression toward a hypostatized liberal community envisioned as wholly transparent, inclusive, tolerant, and exhaustively informed. Crucially, though, this utopia can only be articulated in a language of permanent deferral and (in what constitutes a diametrical reversal of Aristotelian thought) is being defined either by the presumed absence or by the express rejection of any specific norms or contents—rather than by the practical acknowledgment of their supra-personal authority.15
The self-imposed restriction of recent models of inquiry to tightly localized and circumscribed chronotopes (biographically conceived time spans, the punctum of this or that local “event,” dates of publication, etc.), as fostered by (new) historicism for some time now, ultimately rests on the same axiom that had underwritten the political and economic projects of classical liberalism and their subsidiary rhetoric of emancipation, progress, growth, and political “rights” (liberté, fraternité, and egalité, etc.). Simply put, the (ultimately counterintuitive) axiom in question holds what the French Revolutionary calendar had so categorically stipulated: that the self-creation and self-legitimation of modernity pivots on societies instituting a radical caesura vis-à-vis the past and so freeing themselves from what Thomas Paine calls the “manuscript assumed authority of the dead.”16 Carl Schmitt identifies this “idea of an arbitrary power over history [as] the real revolutionary idea.”17 Defining of modernity—and precisely for that reason not a reliable premise for a critique of modernity—is a self-conscious and provocative rhetoric of which Paine’s Rights of Man is just one, albeit a particularly strident example: viz., the rhetoric of the revolutionary check, the caesura (Grk. ἐπoχή). It hardly surprises that the latter term—literally, “a suspension of judgment” originally elaborated by Sextus Empiricus as an integral component of skepticism—was to prove crucial for the unfolding self-description and self-legitimation of the modern era (Ger. Neuzeit). For unlike all preceding history, modernity stakes its claim to the status of an epoch on a self-certifying, all-pervading skepticism.
“The problem of legitimacy, is bound up with the very concept of an epoch itself,” Hans Blumenberg notes; for “the modern age was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in so doing, simultaneously created the other epochs” (LMA, 116). In staking the legitimacy of its own scientific and political theories on the repudiation of a cyclical, epiphanic, and recursive understanding of time, modernity gave rise not only to itself as a (putatively) rational and legitimate process but also instituted a view of historical time as linear progression divisible into sharply defined epochs. The very intelligibility of distinctive historical experiences now appeared to call for specific methodical procedures aimed at disaggregating and freezing them in time. If all meaning was now understood as “historical” in its very essence, this axiom also implied an understanding of history as ordinary, mundane, and quantifiable factuality. For history to mean anything, the countless events or experiences of which it is composed could never be allowed to mean “too much.” Lest it stray into the forbidden world of the epiphanic and normative, historical meaning had to be structurally embedded, familiar, cross-referenced, aggregated. As early as 1798, Friedrich Schlegel had lampooned historicism’s irrational desire to “discover” and prove that all things past are familiar and can be assimilated to our conceptual frameworks by means of an ostensibly value-neutral methodology whereby meanings are never creatively generated but, instead, arise by default or imply themselves. As he notes, “the two main principles of the so-called historical criticism are the Postulate of Vulgarity and the Axiom of the Average. The Postulate of Vulgarity: everything great, good, and beautiful is improbable because it is extraordinary and, at the very least, suspicious. The Axiom of the Average: as we and our surroundings are, so must it have been always and everywhere, because that, after all, is so very natural.”18 As a fundamentally sociological (anti-aesthetic, iconoclastic) decoding of any variety of material and symbolic facts, objects, and practices, historicism’s commerce with the real is a case of containing and stabilizing otherness in the modality of objective retrieval.
If one accepts Arnold Gehlen’s forceful juxtaposition of primitive and modern forms of life, this very impulse turns out to be of archaic provenance. The historicist method of knowing thus would constitute a late instance of what Gehlen calls “transcendence towards this world” (Transzendieren ins Diesseits), viz., a stabilizing of the past by means of methodical and disciplinary “presentation” (Darstellung) whose investment is prima facie not to transform but to disarm the otherness of what has indisputably been bequeathed to us. Modern (historicist) “method” thus can be read as a distant echo of the crucially stabilizing function that “ritual” holds for primitive cultures. In either case, we are presented with modes of practice (Verhaltensweisen) “no longer aimed at improving, ennobling, or enriching the objects of practical engagement, no longer concerned with some kind of transformation; and indeed it is apparent that only such a non-transformative practice can provide a foundation for the idea of an enduring trans-temporal existence.”19 Paradoxically, then, the peculiar “creativity” of primitive ritual and modern method lies in its insistence on continuities, recursive patterns, and the strange security and comfort that makes its reappearance in an institutionally embedded proceduralism that Gehlen analyzes under the heading of Habitualisierung.
Yet such neutralization of the foreign and the other (Gehlen’s Aussenwelt) always carries within its bosom the seeds of a new kind of discontent. For neither ritual nor method allows its practitioners to become conscious and articulate about its underlying function. To a significant extent, that is, the peculiar efficacy of ritualized or methodical practice hinges on the non-knowledge of the individuals or communities whose flourishing it helps secure. We recall Jean-Luc Marion’s caveat that method “should not . . . secure indubitability in the mode of a possession of objects that are certain because produced according to the a priori conditions for knowledge. It should . . . not run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore-seeing it, pre-dicting it, and pro-ducing it, in order to await it from the outset at the end of the path (meta-hodos) onto which it has just barely set forth.”20 And yet, it is just this impression of a closed circuit that modern disciplinary and institutionally framed methods of inquiry often convey. It is no accident, surely, that historicism and liberalism begin to dominate the modern bourgeois imaginary as putatively inevitable developments during the first half of the nineteenth century. If the historicist method construes our commerce with the past as a one-way street whereby unself-conscious, agonistic past events are sublated into safe and familiar meanings by an oddly disembodied and transactional mode of scholarly production, its suitable counterpart is the “infinite conversation” that Carl Schmitt had identified as the vexing legacy of Romantic liberalism. In either case, we are presented with a ritualized, methodical work ethic, even as the “cause” or “end” for the sake of which such inquiry and debate are so ceaselessly being pursued is never properly articulated. There is no normative end, purpose, let alone a concept of the good but only further transaction or busi/ness. The term that encapsulates modernity’s striking asymmetry between means and ends, between complex technologies of inquiry and a peculiar inarticulacy about ends and hesitancy about commitment to (or participation in) the phenomena under investigation is professionalism. Indeed, the first order of modern professionalism is to generate visible (published) tokens of one’s industriousness such as will affirm one’s institutional credentials and professional persona.21 Professionalism involves the outward, accumulative commitment to an idea of knowledge whose ultimate “end” (in the Aristotelian sense) it cannot specify.
The institutional, trans-individual, and accumulative mode of knowledge production just sketched and so unreflexively implemented within contemporary humanistic inquiry is not, however, without its own prehistory. For what Hans Blumenberg calls “the process of theoretical curiosity” unwittingly transposes the ancient cosmological attribute of infinity into the proceduralism of modern knowledge production. Already vexing to early modern thinkers, such as Pascal and Hobbes, “infinity is more a predicate of indefiniteness than of fulfilling dignity, more an expression of disappointment than of presumption.” As modern rationalism (beginning with Nicholas Cusanus) began to transpose the attribute of “infinity” from the object of Scholastic inquiry (God) to the process of knowledge itself, it risked pervasive discontent on account of “the indefinite character of its course, the lack of distinctive points, intermediate goals, or even final goals.”22 With the concept of number and its infinite expandability (connexio) serving as its new “metaphysical archetype,” modern knowledge thus had to change its “criterion for the general validity of a proposition: for it to be true, the predicate no longer needed to merge without remainder into its subject; rather, what was now required was a self-evident and universal rule of progress guaranteeing that the difference between subject and predicate be steadily diminishing.”23 At the level of terminology, the most conspicuous new term to express the accumulative, impersonal, and abstract mode of knowledge production is that of “system,” which arises to prominence in the later seventeenth century and undergoes further scrutiny and differentiation throughout the eighteenth century.24 Along with the emergence and eventual dominance of “system” as the new, concerted mode of intellectual production we also note the individual’s growing alienation from philosophical thinking (in the classical, eudaimonistic sense), specifically its vexing inability to specify any normative objective (in the sense of an Aristotelian telos) that is being served by the production of knowledge.
This crucial (if logically flawed) transposition of infinity from a heretofore divine attribute onto modernity’s procedural model of inquiry as the accumulation of facts and propositions at once specialized and abstract implies that a given instance of cognition may claim only a transitory, occasional, and instrumental role within the process of knowledge itself. The “end” of the process as such remains forever beyond the purview of any individual because “questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent.”25 Arising in sync with the doctrines of classical liberalism and eighteenth-century political economy, such a conception of rational inquiry tends to conflate meaning with value and value with utility, such that what can be known (or, for that matter, is deemed worth knowing) pivots on its perceived expediency or commodity value. Yet the problem with such a self-perpetuating instrumental logic is that in subordinating all its epistemic claims to an abstract and unreflected notion of utility it perpetrates a new type of alienation and meaninglessness on modern productive existence. For inasmuch as the utilitarian “appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier . . . the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without a clear content at all” (AV, 64).
In a subtler language that will occupy us again later, Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) and his posthumous Opus Maximum anticipate MacIntyre’s critique of a strictly instrumental notion of rationality and of moral agency. For to posit “virtue as a species of prudence” whose actions “originate in motives supplied by the present state of existence” mires the utilitarian account in a notion of immediacy that runs counter to its calculating implementation. Attempts to respond to this dilemma by drawing a distinction “between Selfishness, or the unconsidered obedience to an immediate appetite or restlessness, and Self-interest, i.e., the extension and modification of the same selfishness by Fore-thought,” come to nothing. For as Coleridge notes, “this argument supposes the plenary causative or determining power in these motives or impulses, so that both the one and the other do not at all differ from physical impact as far as the relation of cause and effect is concerned.” Clearly, lest it should indeed deserve its eventual label as the “pig-philosophy,” utilitarianism at the very least had to grant that “a motive is neither more nor less than the act of an intelligent being determining itself . . . i.e., the power of an intelligent being to determine its own agency.” Hence the utilitarian’s makeshift discrimination between self-interest and selfishness begs the overall question of what prompts our (moral) choices in life; for “we should still have to ask what determined the mind to permit this determining power to these motives and impulses. Or why did the mind or Will sink from its proper superiority to the physical laws of cause and effect, and place itself in the same class with the bullet or the billiard-ball?”26 There simply is no alternative, Coleridge insists, but to acknowledge that “the Man makes the motive, and not the motive the Man” (AR, 74), a point developed in John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent, which repeatedly insists that the foundation for all cognition is to be found, not in the “paper logic” of some syllogistic template, but in the realm of personal judgment or “Illative Sense” roughly analogous to Aristotelian phronēsis: “It is the mind that reasons and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions.”27
Utilitarianism and classical political liberalism, as well as their twentieth-century sociological and political extensions (e.g., pragmatism, behaviorism, and analytical moral philosophy, anti-foundationalism) prove so frustrating and ineffectual because they refuse as a matter of principle to identify any normative framework of ends (be it “divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority”) within which individual practices and utterances are to acquire any significance. As MacIntyre puts it, what Enlightenment pluralism ensured was that “each moral agent now spoke unconstrained; . . . but why should anyone else now listen to him?” (AV, 68). MacIntyre’s and Arendt’s critiques of utilitarianism are substantially anticipated by Hegel, who notes how for utilitarian thought the value or significance of anything depends solely on whether it facilitates the strictly formal and contentless end of “pleasure.” Hence the “thing” itself (die Sache selbst) is “only a pure moment,” a merely transitional reality; it can only ever be “absolute for an other” and thus has reality merely as a means to a forever unspecified end. For individuals or communities to organize their private or social concerns in this manner is to commit to a wholly inexplicit and unexamined standard of “utility” as the new criterion of value and meaning. Hence, utilitarianism rests on two equally flawed assumptions: (1) what kinds of things should count as useful; and (2) that utility (a means/end rationality) should be the only standard or measure of value. In leaving these assumptions essentially unexamined or un-reflected, consciousness can only locate this “notion” of utility in (or project it onto) an object outside itself. For Hegel, utilitarianism thus constitutes indeed “a metaphysics, but not as yet the comprehension of it” (PS, 354).28 Utilitarianism’s “bad infinity” (schlechte Unendlichkeit) thus offers the most conspicuous illustration of how the gradual contraction of reasoning to instrumental “reckoning” and efficient causation had atrophied the life of the mind in its various interlocking dimensions as thinking, willing, and judging—and, by extension, had thoroughly eroded the integrity of the human person as a responsible agent.
What renders modern utilitarian thought both incoherent and dangerous is its principled inarticulacy about ends. The single-minded preoccupation with the maximization of means and efficiencies also happens to be something that utilitarianism has in common with pluralism, with which it thus forms the peculiar symbiosis of modern liberalism. Both utilitarianism and pluralism emphatically repudiate as outright coercive any framework such as seeks to evaluate and normatively appraise actual or proposed economic, cultural, religious, or personal practices—including the methodical, specialized, and professional pursuit of knowledge. What this amounts to is the de facto abandonment of the Platonic and Aristotelian ideal of the polis as a community substantially defined by its sustained and explicit deliberation about the right “ends.” Instead, modernity—certainly by the time of Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, and Hobbes—expects the self to adjust to structures and disciplines (of behavior, representation, labor, or moral justification) without making explicit the “end” relative to which specifically these structures and practices are indeed the appropriate and ethically justifiable means. For Hannah Arendt, “the much deplored devaluation of all things, that is, the loss of all intrinsic worth, begins with their transformation into values or commodities, for from this moment on they exist only in relation to some other thing which can be acquired in their stead.” Hence, “in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends. This perplexity . . . can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between ‘in order to’ and ‘for the sake of’” (HC, 165, 154).
It is during the period of European Romanticism (ca. 1780–1830), and specifically in Coleridge’s expansive critique of modern reason’s dangerously incoherent assumptions about human agency, that we first encounter the thesis (eventually formulated by Hans Blumenberg) that modernity arose by radically overstating its emancipatory and self-authorizing potential. One aspect of modernity’s hubris involves its impoverished, flat-line image of time as a single, undifferentiated, progressive vector of strictly anthropomorphic character. What disappears is not only the possibility that time might involve various epiphanic intensities but also the ancient distinction between the punctum of biographical time and the long durée of cosmological time, a distinction that Blumenberg develops under the heading of Lebenszeit and Weltzeit. In questioning the modern project’s intellectual coherence and moral integrity, Goethe and especially the later Coleridge proceed from the assumption that the proverbial ancient/modern divide amounts less to a decisive break than a prolonged failure to remember traditions, legacies, and debts that, however unrecognized or repressed, continue to operate with undiminished efficacy. For the later Coleridge in particular, there is growing evidence that many of the conflicts and antagonisms vexing modern European society inadvertently re-enact a philosophical dilemma that had haunted Western civilization since the patristic attempts at consolidating Christianity as a coherent theological system in response to the competing philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period (Stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism).
Before we explore that dilemma in detail, a methodological reflection is in order. For even as Goethe’s and Coleridge’s ambitious speculations about modernity are liable to disconcert today’s critic with their grand narrative design, it is precisely on account of their provocation to modern, hyper-specialized, and post-metaphysical inquiry that works like Faust II or the Opus Maximum warrant careful consideration. At the very least, writers as capacious in their range and depth as Goethe and Coleridge prompt us to move away from a parochial and hermetic niche-criticism whose historicist and materialist assumptions and methodologies have steadily diminished the scope and stakes of intellectual argument in the humanities today. Moreover, the two writers just mentioned—of which the remainder of this study can only pursue the case of Coleridge—also throw into relief the regrettable myopia wrought by the late nineteenth-century quarantining of literary history from philosophy and theology, as well as the equally unfortunate, concurrent segregation of national literatures. Coleridge is truly unique as regards the historical range and analytic depth with which he engages intellectual traditions in philosophy, philology, the life sciences, and theology—fields whose bearing on Romantic culture and literature he saw so clearly, perhaps because “literary studies” had not yet branched off into the hermetic pursuit that it was to become a generation later. Indeed, it is the exceptional scope and intensity of Coleridge’s intellectual pursuits that allow him to conceive of modernity as a pervasive and potentially irremediable dilemma. As he came to understand it, the modern intellectual’s main task was to reappraise the long Enlightenment from Descartes and Hobbes onward, as well as the revolutionary developments at the close of the eighteenth century: not as the apotheosis or fulfillment of modernity’s aspirations and promises but as the phase during which the antagonisms and plain incoherence of the modern Enlightenment project reach critical mass, with seemingly catastrophic results. Certainly by the time he leaves for Malta in 1805, Coleridge has effectively abandoned a more conventional and circumscribed identity as poet in favor of philosophical and, eventually, theological speculations that until the early 1810s are now and then punctuated by flurries of more occasional, journalistic prose (gathered as Essays on his Times in the Princeton edition of his Collected Works). Yet in those more topical writings, too, Coleridge aims to develop a critical perspective on the self-certifying, liberal-progressive optimism that can be traced back, at the very least, to Descartes’s pivotal conceptual bequest to modernity: the idea of skepticism as a method of epistemological self-creation, and the instauration of method as the successor to judgment (prohairesis) as it had been realized in Platonic dialogue and Aristotelian rational, inductive pedagogy (epagōgē).29 For it was above all the idea of method that had facilitated the emergence, first in Britain and then on the Continent, of a new type of speculative, entrepreneurial, and self-transforming type of individuality.
Portions of this and the following chapter have appeared in an earlier version in MLN and are here being reproduced with the kind permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
1. McEwan, Amsterdam, 68–69.
2. On Schelling’s crucial role in the formation of Marx’s thought, see Frank, Der Unendliche Mangel an Seyn; on the relationship between Romantic (aesthetic) philosophy and modern critical theory, see Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, esp. 65–89; and Frank, Einführung, esp. lectures 1–10; for recent accounts of the changing conception of philosophy in German idealism, see Beiser, German Idealism; Pinkard, German Philosophy; E. Cassirer, Erkenntnisproblem, vol. 3.
3. On nineteenth-century historicism and its inflection by (post-) modern new historicism, see Chandler, England in 1819, esp. 3–93; Pfau, “Reading beyond Redemption;” Liu, “New Historicism” and “Local Transcendence”; Elam and Ferguson, eds., Wordsworthian Enlightenment (esp. the essays by Alan Liu and Kevis Goodman); on the origins of modern historicism in Romantic hermeneutics, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, esp. 194–235; for a different, equally acute critique of historicism as “the ultimate outcome of the crisis of modern natural right,” see Strauss, Natural Right and History, esp. 9–34 (quote from 34).
4. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 23; on the relation of nominalism to historicism, see Chandler, England in 1819, 53–73.
5. The same restrictive conception of knowledge is observable in some modern thinkers, too, such as Pascal and “the greatest modern Augustinian, Heidegger.” Pippin, Idealism, 277, 278; on Pascal, see Auerbach’s “On the Political Theory of Pascal,” in Scenes, 101–132.
6. Mittelstrass, “Bildung und Wissenschaft,” 83–104; on the topos-history of “the book of nature,” see Blumenberg, Lesbarkeit, 162–179.
7. Dialectic, 25.
8. Dialectic, xi–xii. Some six decades later, the state of the modern university shows Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of commodified knowledge to have been remarkably prescient. On the incoherent curricula of contemporary higher education and the presumed “separateness and separability [of knowledge] both from the uses to which it is put, and from the personal lives, particular beliefs, social practices, and specific commitments of those who create and transmit it,” see Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 298–363 (quote from 303); on the hollowing out of intellectual passion and labor by corporate structures, see Tuchman, Wannabe University, esp. 48–87; Washburn, University Inc., 29–42 and 137–170; and Bok, Universities in the Marketplace, esp. 99–121. A revealing instance of the preoccupation with revenue-generating knowledge and the consequent, rampant (and inevitably short-sighted) instrumentalization of inquiry in higher education, see the Strategic Plan by Duke University (September 2006). For a critique of these trends from the perspective of pure (scientific) research and theology, respectively, see M. Polanyi on the limits of doubt and the inescapability of commitment (Personal Knowledge, 269–324) and Griffiths, on the centrality of wonder and participation to human inquiry (Intellectual Appetite, 75–91 and 124–138).
9. Blumenberg, LMA, 238; more than anything, it is the rise of modern professionalism that has vanquished the classical, eudemonistic conception of knowledge as theoria and thaumazein (“wonder”). On the emergence of modern professionalized modes of production, see Larson, Rise of Professionalism, esp. 2–18 and 104–158; Abbott, System of Professions, esp. 86–113; on the professionalization of English in print culture, advanced literary study, and global publishing, see Ohman, Politics of Knowledge, and Ruth, Novel Professions, 1–32; on the beginnings of professionalized models of authorship and literary production, see Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 25–27 and 105–113.
10. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 175, 177.
11. “Knowledge is that wh. can be taught and perhaps is the only thing wh. can be, if teaching is used in the truest sense of getting a certain connection into the pupil’s mind . . . On this ground imparting opinion is not to be called teaching, for in one way Plato seems to look on opinion as marked off fr. knowledge very much by its unconnectedness.” Essay written for T. H. Green at Balliol College (Michaelmas Term, 1866), in Hopkins, Collected Works, 4:270–271 (italics mine); the preceding essays in this edition (pp. 256–269), written for R. Williams, develop related arguments.
12. See Thorne, who has persuasively argued that “we can discover in early modern philosophy more than the rigid imposition of tyrannical epistemologies, the single-minded clampdown of a claustrophobic empiricism and a one-eyed reason” and who rejects “the assumption that skepticism is inherently ‘radical’, but also . . . the undifferentiated view of early modern intellectual history that makes this claim possible” (Dialectect, 15).
13. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 173; see also 23–24; Gunton also identifies “what can be called a pluralism of indifference,” a version of “modern liberalism [that] is selective in its tolerance inasmuch as it generates an intolerance of any position which makes claims for truth” (The One, the Three, and the Many, 105–106).
14. For an incisive critique of various assumptions supporting the concept of “secularization,” see Blumenberg, LMA, 3–121; on historicism’s implicit ethos of retroactive liberation, see my “Reading beyond Redemption.”
15. In the classical era, the most typical expression of normativity involved a conception of the virtues; for strong accounts of the Aristotelian position, see MacIntyre, AV, 146–164; more critical of Aristotle’s argument on “magnanimity” (mēgalopsychia) is Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 23–44; see also her subsequent discussion of the emergent critique of virtue ethics after Aquinas and the contraction of the virtues into a single, abstract, and increasingly empty notion.
16. Rights of Man, 42.
17. Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 62; on the theoretical assumptions standing behind (and propping up the argumentative force) of specific dates (especially in the new historicism), see White, “Imagination’s Date.” On the theoretical premises of (Romantic) historicism, see Chandler, England in 1819, 47–93; on questions of historical time, see Pocock, Politics, 233–272.
18. Philosophical Fragments, 3, no. 25.
19. “[Für] das rituell darstellende Verhalten . . . geht es also nicht mehr um ein Verbessern, Veredeln, Anreichern des Gegenstandes dieses Verhaltens, um irgendeine Veränderung, und es ist einsichtig, dass allein ein solches nichtveränderndes Handeln die Vorstellung eines dauernden, zeitüberlegenen Daseins zu tragen vermag” (Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, 16).
20. Being Given, 9.
21. On sociology’s inability to conceptualize the larger process of modernity (of which sociology is itself a disciplinary and institutional effect), see Milbank’s account of Max Weber: “Weberian sociology betrays and subverts history. It takes as an a priori principle of sociological investigation what should be the subject of genuine historical enquiry: namely, the emergence of a secular polity, the modern imagining of incommensurable value spheres and the possibility of a formal regulation of society” (Milbank, Theology, 91).
22. Blumenberg, LMA, 84–85, quotes from Pascal’s Traité de Vide (“On Emptiness”) as an early instance of this shift; for a related discussion, see Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 2–11; still the standard account of the emergent, procedural, and administrative model of justice in the modern nation state is Foucault, Order, 312–318; for a superb and concise account of the “emergence of objectivity,” see Dupré, Passage, 65–90.
23. E. Cassirer, Erkenntnisproblem, 2:180–181; translation mine.
24. On the rise of system, see Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, 126–148; Siskin, “Year of the System”; and Mitchell, “Fane of Tescalipoca.” Aside from qualifying Siskin’s taxonomy of systems in important ways, Mitchell also draws attention to a sacrificial logic integral to both conceiving and maintaining systems.
25. MacIntyre, AV, 26; this passage appears to echo a nearly identical comment by Adorno and Horkheimer: “Reason is the organ of calculation; it is neutral in regard to ends; its element is coordination” (Dialectic, 88); for an Augustinian radicalization of MacIntyre’s Aristotelian critique of modern rationalism, see Milbank, Theology, 327–354.
26. OM, 24–26; as Coleridge elaborates elsewhere, “a Will conceived separately from Intelligence is a Non-entity, and a mere Phantasm of Abstraction; and that a Will, the state of which does in no sense originate in its own act, is an absolute contradiction. It might be an Instinct, an Impulse, a plastic Power, and, if accompanied with consciousness, a Desire; but a Will it could not be” (AR, 141).
27. Grammar of Assent, 276.
28. As C. Taylor puts it, if “utilitarianism is . . . the ethic of the Enlightenment . . . in which acts are judged according to their consequences” such a conception only ever assigns instrumental significance to any particular thing or idea. It therefore is unable to articulate an end or “final purpose; or, as Hegel puts it, this chain of extrinsic justifications does not return to a self, that is to a subjectivity which would encompass the whole development.” We thus have “a bad infinity [schlechte Unendlichkeit]” (Hegel, 181).
29. While Aristotle’s conception of epagōgē is diametrically opposed to the deductive arguments from first principles that characterize modern (Cartesian) rationalism, there has been debate about whether the Aristotelian concept anticipates modern theories of induction. I concur with Engberg-Pederson, who has argued that, contrary to modern inductive methods, Aristotelian epagōgē is not burdened with the task of self-legitimation that defines all modern methodologies: “the question of the validity of a given piece of epagoge never arises for Aristotle. There is epagoge when in a debate you make somebody accept some universal point on the basis of a review of particular cases, whether this point be true or false, and there is epagoge when you make somebody see a mathematical truth. Equally, whether you point to one particular case or to many or to all (where that is possible) is quite unimportant: Aristotle does not distinguish between those modern forms of induction (‘perfect,’ ‘intuitive’ and the like), quite simply because his concept of epagoge only contains the minimal content that is common to most modern types of induction, viz. coming to see some universal point as a consequence of attending to particular cases” (“More on Aristotelian Epagoge,” 307).