I'm still reading Gillespie. I've got to finish today and get on to other projects that have to be finished up before vacation. But this stuff is so good.
In his chapter on Hobbes, Gillespie notes the fact that scholasticism made use of Aristotle's four causes, but that Hobbes "reworks this Aristotelian notion of causality. He recognizes only a material and an efficient cause." (230) Hobbes does not believe in an unmoved mover, but is a first cause who himself is in perpetual motion. Gillespie writes:
"Hobbes thus rejects the Platonic claim essential to medieval Christianity that God and thus true being are unchanging. Rest in Hobbes' view cannot be attributed to God . . . Motion is the action of God, and this action in nominalistic fashion is not governed by any reason or purpose other than God's omnipotent and indifferent will. The cosmological consequence of this position is that there is no rational or natural goal of bodily motion. Effectively then for Hobbes, God is the same as the causal process or, in the words of Leviathan, nature is God's artifice, his continuing activity." (229)
Hobbes rejects the Christian idea of a personal God who personally creates the world and governs it by Providence so as to bring it to its eschatological conclusion. But he does not leave the world drifting aimlessly without guidance. Man takes the place of God. As Gillespie notes: "The goal of Hobbes' science is thus not merely to understand the world but to change it, to give human beings the power to preserve themselves and improve their earthly lot." (231) He quotes Hobbes' De Corpore as follows: "The end of knowledge is power." (231)
If the goal is to understand nature including human nature, then one needs to consider the final cause. However, if the goal is not to understand, but to change and dominate nature including human nature, then final cause is not just irrelevant but an actual impediment that must be done away with! To the extent that, say human sexuality to pick one currently relevant example, has a purpose - a natural end - designed by the Creator, there are limits on how man can change it, manipulate it, use it etc. Humans cannot, however, be prevented from asking "why" questions and so the idea of a final cause can never be banished from human thought entirely. The demonic genius of modernity (as seen here in Hobbes) is that it re-assigns final causation from the nature and acts of God to the will of man. In an inversion worthy of the imagination of the greatest of poets, man takes over God's role of determining ultimate ends and God (understood as motion in nature) takes man's role of conforming to the will of another.
It is surely fitting that Gillespie quotes from Milton's Paradise Lost at the beginning of his book the passage from 1.242-63 which ends with the words:
"We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
Showing posts with label Michael Allen Gillespie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Allen Gillespie. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Descartes' Understanding of Man
I am still reading Michael Allen Gillespie's thought-provoking book entitled The Theological Origins of Modernity (U. of Chicago Press, 2008). I have to return it to the library tomorrow since I'm off canoeing on Friday morning. The hardback edidition seems to be sold out and the paperback edition is scheduled for Sept. 15. This book is a detailed exposition of the thesis Gillespie first developed in his Nihilism Before Nietzsche (U. of Chicago Press, 1995).
He contends that modernity develops out of late medieval nominalism, which became believable in the midst of the multiple crises that afflicted Europe in the 14th century including the Black Death, the 100 Years War, the Little Ice Age and so on. The remote, unpredictable God of nominalism, who is so different from the rational God of Scholasticism, made sense to the people of the 14th century. The rise of modernity, and this is crucial, was not the rejection of theology and religion, but a new approach to metaphysics based on this new concept of God. The medieval culture in which the God of the classical Augustinian-Thomist tradition made sense had suffered such a series of shocks that the new teaching of nominalism and its God of sheer will took hold and shaped the thinking of many in the Rennaissance, the Reformation and early modern philosophy, including the thought of Descartes.
Here is what Gillespie has to say about Descartes: (my bolding)
_____________
Descartes' solution to the problem posed by the omnipotent God thus leads to a radically new vision of what it is to be a human being.
A human being for Descartes is a thinking thing (res cogitans). A thinking thing, however, is a representing, constructing thing, and is especially always a self-representing or self-positing thing. The Cartesian human being is thus at its core a self-positing thing, self-grounding being. Man in this way ceases to be considered the rational animal and instead is conceived as the willing being. Both humanism and the Reformation, as we have seen, similarly located man's humanity in the will rather than in the reason. Descartes is indebeted to both of them but moves also beyond them. In contrast to humanism, his subject is abstracted from the historical world, and has no personality, no virtues or vices, no concern with immortal fame. The willing subject, however, is thus not constrained by the finitude of this world and consequently can imagine becoming its absolute master. Similarly, the subject's will is not subordinate to or in conflict with the will of God. . .
This subject's rethinking of thinking as willing is the ground of Descartes' attempt to construct a citidal of reason for human beings against the potentially malevolent omnipotence of God. . . Doubting in one sense seems to stand between affirming and denying, but in another sense it looks as if it should be paired with faith or belief, which is perhaps surpressed in Descartes' account because of its controversial place in Reformation debates. In fact, for Descartes the concealed opposite of doubt is not belief or faith but certainty. Certainty and natural science thereby replace faith and theology for Descartes. (p. 199)
______________
I have never read a better short summary of how modernity got started. In Gillsepie's account, it is easy to see how what begins in Descartes ultimately leads through Kant to Nietzsche. The willing self is the common thread through all three phases of modernity: (1) the rational phase of the 17-18th century Enlightenment, (2) the romantic or feeling phase of the 19th century and (3) the will to power phase of the 20th century.
Behind the new account of the Promethean, infinite will of the human subject lies the dark and foreboding vision of the unpredictable God of sheer will of nominalism. So if the autonomous, willing self is the central thread of modernity, behind the anthropology lies a theology. This means that modernity is essentially a Christian heresy. It is a heresy which has led to materialism, atheism and the culture of death. It is not something new in history (as for Hans Blumenberg) or a logical development of Christianity (Karl Lowith), but a heretical doctrine of God and a heretical doctrine of man. It can even be understood as a revival of ancient heresies in a new historical form. If this analysis is correct, then modernity is a dead end and the only way forward is the recovery of classical, Christian orthodoxy.
He contends that modernity develops out of late medieval nominalism, which became believable in the midst of the multiple crises that afflicted Europe in the 14th century including the Black Death, the 100 Years War, the Little Ice Age and so on. The remote, unpredictable God of nominalism, who is so different from the rational God of Scholasticism, made sense to the people of the 14th century. The rise of modernity, and this is crucial, was not the rejection of theology and religion, but a new approach to metaphysics based on this new concept of God. The medieval culture in which the God of the classical Augustinian-Thomist tradition made sense had suffered such a series of shocks that the new teaching of nominalism and its God of sheer will took hold and shaped the thinking of many in the Rennaissance, the Reformation and early modern philosophy, including the thought of Descartes.
Here is what Gillespie has to say about Descartes: (my bolding)
_____________
Descartes' solution to the problem posed by the omnipotent God thus leads to a radically new vision of what it is to be a human being.
A human being for Descartes is a thinking thing (res cogitans). A thinking thing, however, is a representing, constructing thing, and is especially always a self-representing or self-positing thing. The Cartesian human being is thus at its core a self-positing thing, self-grounding being. Man in this way ceases to be considered the rational animal and instead is conceived as the willing being. Both humanism and the Reformation, as we have seen, similarly located man's humanity in the will rather than in the reason. Descartes is indebeted to both of them but moves also beyond them. In contrast to humanism, his subject is abstracted from the historical world, and has no personality, no virtues or vices, no concern with immortal fame. The willing subject, however, is thus not constrained by the finitude of this world and consequently can imagine becoming its absolute master. Similarly, the subject's will is not subordinate to or in conflict with the will of God. . .
This subject's rethinking of thinking as willing is the ground of Descartes' attempt to construct a citidal of reason for human beings against the potentially malevolent omnipotence of God. . . Doubting in one sense seems to stand between affirming and denying, but in another sense it looks as if it should be paired with faith or belief, which is perhaps surpressed in Descartes' account because of its controversial place in Reformation debates. In fact, for Descartes the concealed opposite of doubt is not belief or faith but certainty. Certainty and natural science thereby replace faith and theology for Descartes. (p. 199)
______________
I have never read a better short summary of how modernity got started. In Gillsepie's account, it is easy to see how what begins in Descartes ultimately leads through Kant to Nietzsche. The willing self is the common thread through all three phases of modernity: (1) the rational phase of the 17-18th century Enlightenment, (2) the romantic or feeling phase of the 19th century and (3) the will to power phase of the 20th century.
Behind the new account of the Promethean, infinite will of the human subject lies the dark and foreboding vision of the unpredictable God of sheer will of nominalism. So if the autonomous, willing self is the central thread of modernity, behind the anthropology lies a theology. This means that modernity is essentially a Christian heresy. It is a heresy which has led to materialism, atheism and the culture of death. It is not something new in history (as for Hans Blumenberg) or a logical development of Christianity (Karl Lowith), but a heretical doctrine of God and a heretical doctrine of man. It can even be understood as a revival of ancient heresies in a new historical form. If this analysis is correct, then modernity is a dead end and the only way forward is the recovery of classical, Christian orthodoxy.
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Meaning and Effect of Late Medieval Nominalism
Here is a quote from Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity, p. 29. His writing is excellent and at times lyrical.
______________
"Nominalism sought to tear the rationalistic veil from the face of God in order to found a true Christianity, but in doing so it revealed a capricious God, fearsome in his power, unknowable, unpredictable, unconstrained by nature and reason, and indifferent to good and evil. This vision of God turned the order of nature into a chaos of individual beings and the order of logic into a mere concatenation of names. Man himself was dethroned from his exalted place in the natural order of things and cast adrift in an infinite universe with no natural law to guide him and no certain path to salvation. It is thus not surprising that for all but the most extreme ascetics and mystics, this dark God of nominalism proved to be a profound source of anxiety and insecurity.
While the influence of this new vision of God derived much of its force from the power of the idea itself and from its scriptural foundation, the concrete conditions of life in the second half of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth centuries played an essential role in its success. During this period, three momentous events, the Black Death, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years Wawr, shook the foundations of medieval civilization that had already been weakened by the failure of the Crusades, the invention of gunpowder, and the severe blow that the Little Ice Age dealt to the agrarian economy that was the foundation of feudal life. While such a vision of God might have been regarded as an absurdity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the catastrophes of the succeeding period helped make such a God believable."
____________
It can be argued (as I do in my new book) that the doctrine of God arising out of nominalism is an heretical understanding of God and so the new anthropology that arises out of this view of God is also heretical. During the modern period, the view of God gradually withers away but the anthropology of man as essentially a willing creature remains. The primacy of the human will becomes the central unifying element in what has come to be known as "modernity" and, of course, in its current iteration it manifests itself in the ideology of "freedom of choice."
______________
"Nominalism sought to tear the rationalistic veil from the face of God in order to found a true Christianity, but in doing so it revealed a capricious God, fearsome in his power, unknowable, unpredictable, unconstrained by nature and reason, and indifferent to good and evil. This vision of God turned the order of nature into a chaos of individual beings and the order of logic into a mere concatenation of names. Man himself was dethroned from his exalted place in the natural order of things and cast adrift in an infinite universe with no natural law to guide him and no certain path to salvation. It is thus not surprising that for all but the most extreme ascetics and mystics, this dark God of nominalism proved to be a profound source of anxiety and insecurity.
While the influence of this new vision of God derived much of its force from the power of the idea itself and from its scriptural foundation, the concrete conditions of life in the second half of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth centuries played an essential role in its success. During this period, three momentous events, the Black Death, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years Wawr, shook the foundations of medieval civilization that had already been weakened by the failure of the Crusades, the invention of gunpowder, and the severe blow that the Little Ice Age dealt to the agrarian economy that was the foundation of feudal life. While such a vision of God might have been regarded as an absurdity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the catastrophes of the succeeding period helped make such a God believable."
____________
It can be argued (as I do in my new book) that the doctrine of God arising out of nominalism is an heretical understanding of God and so the new anthropology that arises out of this view of God is also heretical. During the modern period, the view of God gradually withers away but the anthropology of man as essentially a willing creature remains. The primacy of the human will becomes the central unifying element in what has come to be known as "modernity" and, of course, in its current iteration it manifests itself in the ideology of "freedom of choice."
Three Views of Modernity
In his highly suggestive and groundbreaking work, The Theological Origins of Modernity (U. of Chicago Press, 2008), Michael Allen Gillespie suggests that there are three ways of understanding the way forward for Western culture. The crisis of the Twentieth century - from the Great War to the Holocaust - has demonstrated the failure of modernity to deliver on its promises of peace, rationality, justice and progress. The fall of the Berlin wall is counter-balanced by the events of 9/11, which demonstrate that war, conflict and opposing religions are as much a part of the twenty-first century world as they were of 17th century Europe. The Enlightenment Project has failed.
Gillespie outlines a three-fold typology of responses.
1. The Premoderns: First, there are those who call us to return to something pre-modern. Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of the European Sciences is a key work here. Leo Strauss argued that the overwhelming of natural law and ancient rationalism by a "technology of power and a doctrine of natural rights" is the problem. (8) Hannah Arendt puts her hope for renewal in "the aesthetic politics and public life of Athenian democracy." (8) Eric Voegelin saw "a revival of Platonic Christianity as the best hope for renewal." (9)
We could add to the list here. Pope John Paul II was a scholar of Husserl and Phenomenology and wrote his second doctoral thesis on Max Scheler. He developed a personalist anthropology by combining phenomenology and Thomism. Benedict XVI calls for a revival of Platonic Christianity in his Regensberg Lecture. John Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy also look to ancient and medieval philosophy for the basis for building an alternative to modern and postmodern philosophy.
2. The Postmoderns: Second, there are those who see the crisis of modernity as a crisis of the entire tradition of Western thought beginning with Plato and culminating with Hegel. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is the key work here. Here, the critique is directed not against a peculiarly modern form of rationality, but against "logocentrism" itself. the solution for thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and company is a post-structuralist philosphy of difference, which is seen as being capable of delivering us from modernity.
3. The Moderns: Third, there are those who believe that the only problem with modernity is that it has not yet been modern enough; that Western culture has not yet been able to rid itself of the irrational hang-overs of past superstitions and atavistic beliefs. So National Socialism is seen not as modern, but as a remnant of a Teutonic past or as a romantic reaction against modernity. The totalitarian character of socialism in Russia is explained, not as a logical result of the implementation of a Marxist philosophy but as a carry-over of the long spiritual authoritarianism of Russian Orthodoxy. The collapse of the Soviet Union is viewed as a vindication of modernity and as a sign of the progress of the modern project. The motto here is that you can't make an omlette without cracking a few eggs.
For all the talk of postmodernism, this third option is still in many ways the most powerful in Western cuture today. And it is possible (my view, not Gillespie's) to see modernism and postmodernism blending together, as for example, when thinkers supposedly as radical as Foucault and Derrida turn out in the end to have no alternative to liberalism and to, in fact, be liberals. (See Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? by J. K. Smith.)
Gillespie's contribution is to try to clarify the real origins of modernity, which is a real service to those who are attracted to the first option above. He does not locate the origin of modernity in the Enlightenment or in modern science or in a new concept of reason. Instead, he sees modernity as arising out of the crumbling of medieval culture in the 14th century and as employing an element of medieval thought, namely nominalism. For Gillespie, the growth of nominalism between the 14th and 16th centuries and its new concept of God as sheer will, as omnipotence, and the destruction of the scholastic theology in which God could be known by reason from His works, is the origin of modernity. By the age of Luther, only one university in Germany was not dominated by nominalism.
The self-assertion, which Hans Blumenberg sees as the essence of modernity in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (MIT Press, 1989), is understood by Gillespie to be rooted in the need of man to assert himself over against the threat of an arbitrary God whose unpredictableness makes life frightening and whose will must be resisted by man asserting his own will over against the will of God. The project of attaining power over nature has it roots in this new understanding of God and the new understanding of man that flows from it.
George Grant understood modernity about as well as anyone and his analysis of technology and power uncovers the essence of modernity. It is interesting to note that his name can be added to the list of those who view the recovery of the Platonic Christian tradition as essential to the reinvigoration of Western culture.
Gillespie outlines a three-fold typology of responses.
1. The Premoderns: First, there are those who call us to return to something pre-modern. Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of the European Sciences is a key work here. Leo Strauss argued that the overwhelming of natural law and ancient rationalism by a "technology of power and a doctrine of natural rights" is the problem. (8) Hannah Arendt puts her hope for renewal in "the aesthetic politics and public life of Athenian democracy." (8) Eric Voegelin saw "a revival of Platonic Christianity as the best hope for renewal." (9)
We could add to the list here. Pope John Paul II was a scholar of Husserl and Phenomenology and wrote his second doctoral thesis on Max Scheler. He developed a personalist anthropology by combining phenomenology and Thomism. Benedict XVI calls for a revival of Platonic Christianity in his Regensberg Lecture. John Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy also look to ancient and medieval philosophy for the basis for building an alternative to modern and postmodern philosophy.
2. The Postmoderns: Second, there are those who see the crisis of modernity as a crisis of the entire tradition of Western thought beginning with Plato and culminating with Hegel. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is the key work here. Here, the critique is directed not against a peculiarly modern form of rationality, but against "logocentrism" itself. the solution for thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and company is a post-structuralist philosphy of difference, which is seen as being capable of delivering us from modernity.
3. The Moderns: Third, there are those who believe that the only problem with modernity is that it has not yet been modern enough; that Western culture has not yet been able to rid itself of the irrational hang-overs of past superstitions and atavistic beliefs. So National Socialism is seen not as modern, but as a remnant of a Teutonic past or as a romantic reaction against modernity. The totalitarian character of socialism in Russia is explained, not as a logical result of the implementation of a Marxist philosophy but as a carry-over of the long spiritual authoritarianism of Russian Orthodoxy. The collapse of the Soviet Union is viewed as a vindication of modernity and as a sign of the progress of the modern project. The motto here is that you can't make an omlette without cracking a few eggs.
For all the talk of postmodernism, this third option is still in many ways the most powerful in Western cuture today. And it is possible (my view, not Gillespie's) to see modernism and postmodernism blending together, as for example, when thinkers supposedly as radical as Foucault and Derrida turn out in the end to have no alternative to liberalism and to, in fact, be liberals. (See Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? by J. K. Smith.)
Gillespie's contribution is to try to clarify the real origins of modernity, which is a real service to those who are attracted to the first option above. He does not locate the origin of modernity in the Enlightenment or in modern science or in a new concept of reason. Instead, he sees modernity as arising out of the crumbling of medieval culture in the 14th century and as employing an element of medieval thought, namely nominalism. For Gillespie, the growth of nominalism between the 14th and 16th centuries and its new concept of God as sheer will, as omnipotence, and the destruction of the scholastic theology in which God could be known by reason from His works, is the origin of modernity. By the age of Luther, only one university in Germany was not dominated by nominalism.
The self-assertion, which Hans Blumenberg sees as the essence of modernity in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (MIT Press, 1989), is understood by Gillespie to be rooted in the need of man to assert himself over against the threat of an arbitrary God whose unpredictableness makes life frightening and whose will must be resisted by man asserting his own will over against the will of God. The project of attaining power over nature has it roots in this new understanding of God and the new understanding of man that flows from it.
George Grant understood modernity about as well as anyone and his analysis of technology and power uncovers the essence of modernity. It is interesting to note that his name can be added to the list of those who view the recovery of the Platonic Christian tradition as essential to the reinvigoration of Western culture.
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