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© 2013 University of Notre Dame © 2013 University of Notre Dame Minding the Modern Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge Minding the Modern © 2013 University of Notre Dame © 2013 University of Notre Dame MINDING the MODERN Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge THOMAS PFAU University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana © 2013 University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2013 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pfau, Thomas, 1960– Minding the modern : human agency, intellectual traditions, and responsible knowledge / Thomas Pfau. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-03840-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-03840-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Humanism. 2. Agent (Philosophy) 3. Philosophical anthropology. 4. Free will and determinism. 5. Humanities. I. Title. B821.P45 2013 190—dc23 2013022543 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. © 2013 University of Notre Dame CONTENTS List of Abbreviations vii Exordium: Modernity’s Gaze 1 PART I. PROLEGOMENA 1 Frameworks or Tools? On the Status of Concepts in 9 Humanistic Inquiry 2 Forgetting by Remembering: Historicism and the Limits of 35 Modern Knowledge 3 “A large mental field”: Intellectual Traditions and Responsible 53 Knowledge after Newman PART II. RATIONAL APPETITE: AN EMERGENT CONCEPTUAL TRADITION 4 Beginnings: Desire, Judgment, and Action in Aristotle and the Stoics 79 5 Consolidation: St. Augustine on Choice, Sin, and the Divided Will 108 6 Rational Appetite and Good Sense: Will and Intellect in Aquinas 133 7 Rational Claims, Irrational Consequences: Ockham Disaggregates 160 Will and Reason © 2013 University of Notre Dame vi Contents PART III. PROGRESSIVE AMNESIA: WILL AND THE CRISIS OF REASON 8 Impoverished Modernity: Will, Action, and Person in 185 Hobbes’s Leviathan 9 The Path toward Non-Cognitivism: Locke’s Desire and Shaftesbury’s 214 Sentiment 10 From Naturalism to Reductionism: Mandeville’s Passion and 249 Hutcheson’s Moral Sense 11 Mindless Desires and Contentless Minds: Hume’s Enigma of Reason 283 12 Virtue without Agency: Sentiment, Behavior, and Habituation in 327 A. Smith 13 After Sentimentalism: Liberalism and the Discontents of Modern 374 Autonomy PART IV. RETRIEVING THE HUMAN: COLERIDGE ON WILL, PERSON, AND CONSCIENCE 14 Good or Commodity? Modern Knowledge and the Loss 417 of Eudaimonia 15 The Persistence of Gnosis: Freedom and “Error” in Philosophical 437 Modernity 16 Beyond Voluntarism and Deontology: Coleridge’s Notion of the 468 Responsible Will 17 Existence before Substance: The Idea of “Person” in Humanistic 504 Inquiry 18 Existence as Reality and Act: Person, Relationality, and 535 Incommunicability 19 “Consciousness has the appearance of another”: On Relationality 556 as Love 20 “Faith is fidelity . to the conscience”: Coleridge’s Ontology 591 Works Cited 619 Index 650 © 2013 University of Notre Dame AbbrEVI TIONS ADT St. Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity [De Trinitate] AR Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection AV Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue BL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time BTr Boethius, Tractates, De Consolatione Philosophiae CCS Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State CD St. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans [De Civitate Dei] CF Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend CL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge CLS Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons CM Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia CN Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, 5 vii © 2013 University of Notre Dame viii Abbreviations CPP William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose DCD John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine EPA Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense GHA Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke HC Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition HI Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue HT David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature Lev. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan LHP Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1818–1819 LMA Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age MFB Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits OM Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Opus Maximum PG G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes PS G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Quodl. William of Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions SC Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times ST St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae SW & F Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works & Fragments SZ Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit TI Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority © 2013 University of Notre Dame Abbreviations ix TMS Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments TT Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk WMA Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship WWR Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation © 2013 University of Notre Dame Portrait of a Gentleman in his Study, 1528–30, Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480–1556) / Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library © 2013 University of Notre Dame E XORDIUM Modernity’s Gaze The young man’s forlorn, abstracted, and blank gaze suggests disorienta- tion and incipient melancholy: we cannot meet his eyes, and they will not meet ours. Indeed, the beholder of Lorenzo Lotto’s canvas may feel somewhat flustered, as though he or she had accidentally intruded on a scene of intensely personal, albeit ineffable anguish. For Lotto’s young man, whose identity remains unknown, seems utterly alone in the world—the quintessentially modern, solitary individual confined to his study in ways familiar from the candle-lit interior of Descartes’s Meditations all the way to the cork-lined refuge where Proust would labor on his magnum opus. Yet Lotto’s youth also appears bereft of the dynamism, confidence, and sense of purpose usually claimed for the modern, autonomous self—be it Descartes’s cogito, John Locke’s “consciousness,” or Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “founding act” (Tathandlung). The cold-blooded lizard and discarded ring on the table hint at the loss of ēros as a source of motivation, an impression compounded by the fact that lute and hunting horn, emblems of conviviality and worldly pleasure, are now hung up on the wall in the background.1 Instead, the glimpse of the outside world that the painting affords us shows dusk encroaching. The pendulum swings; time moves on. We have 1. Dating of Lotto’s canvas varies, with some (Berenson) dating it as early as 1524, and others suggesting dates of 1526 (Brown et al.) or even 1530 (Humfrey). For discussions, see Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, D. A. Brown, Lorenzo Lotto, and Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto. 1 © 2013 University of Notre Dame 2 Minding THE MODERN happened upon a scene of palpable melancholy. Thus, even as a massive folio domi- nates the picture, the young man’s irresolute posture intimates that books no longer hold answers, perhaps because the right questions elude him. On one widely ac- cepted interpretation, the tome is a business ledger. Other, earlier accounts view the massive folio as emblematic of a life of study to which the man now means to dedi- cate himself. Either way, the relation of the young man’s body to the book suggests a state of incapacitation and inertia, rather than gathering resolve. Moreover, the enig- matic knowledge contained in the folio may well account for the young man’s dis- tracted and withdrawn expression. Hence it is that the book’s ponderous mass supports the young man only physically. For his body, leaning on it, strikes a twisted, faintly artificial pose, and his left hand betrays his distracted and indifferent attitude toward the book. Moreover, the absence of a chair, of paper and quill in this study, as well as the miscellaneous array of a half-opened letter and a ruffled blue silk cloth ca- sually bunched up beneath the folio all suggest a psychological state of abstractive loitering rather than focused and purposive study. Meanwhile, the unwieldy folio appears more as dead mass than as a repository of learning. We suspect that the unspecified past wisdom contained in it has but the most tenuous hold on the young man whose consciousness, to judge by his with- drawn gaze, appears altogether adrift. If the book seems incapable of answering ques- tions, it is so because for Lotto’s youth to articulate those questions would require contact with an outside world of experience from which he has quite obviously with- drawn. Sequestered into gathering darkness, the young man appears wholly bereft of sense experience, interpersonal relations, and commitments such as define the world outside his study. That world has been reduced to a narrow slice of landscape faintly illumined from the horizon and soon to be expunged from sight by the nocturnal clouds gathering overhead. Yet, to return to the heart of the painting, the book: does the massive tome with its worn leather binding constitute a bona fide repository of learning, or is it but an emblem of the futility or sheer elusiveness of knowledge? Do the fading rose petals, conventional emblems of transience and of time lost, stand in metonymic relationship to the book’s vellum leaves so distractedly fingered by the man? Is it truly a book, or are we to
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