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.