What is “Modernity”, If it Is?
Two words that I have seen thrown around on a daily basis, with often very little definition, are “modern” and “post-modern.” Both tend to be used as insults in my circles, “modern” referring to hyper-inclusive mass democracy, secularism, and capitalism (of the worse sort), while “post-modern” means subjectivistic, relativistic, and (intentionally) obscure. “Modernity” is the great enemy that needs to be overcome, upon whom all contemporary ills are cast unto. Memes like this
are perfect examples of how “modernity” becomes a catch-all term for “stuff I don’t like” (credit to The Prudentialist for sharing this). Implied in the usage of “modernity”, and the memes surrounding it, is that if we could just get beyond it, or have prevented it, meaning would return to the world and our lives would be healthier.
Taking the meme first, and then looking at the political description of modernity second, we shall see that the word “modernity” needs to be reconsidered. The above meme, putting visually the sentiment that “anything I do not like is modernity”, adds too much to the word “modern.” When “modern” and “modernity” can refer to everything from secularism to McDonalds to not getting a girlfriend, then it has become an oversaturated sponge that, instead of having a clear meaning, seeps out disparate associations when you try to get a hand on it. Any meaning has been killed. Keep it as a slander if you will, or maybe use it as an emote, but you can no longer treat it as a technical term describing an age or a tendency.
Moving on to the more serious use of “modernity”, and what is often given when you press on why so-and-so does not like “the modern world.” There are some real problems with using “modernity” or “modern” to describe hyper-inclusive mass democracy, secularism, and capitalism. Chief among them is none of the thinkers who inhabit The Enlightenment or The Age of Reason, which typically begins with Rene Descartes, believed in hyper-inclusive mass democracy or secularism, and capitalism had been in effect for a couple hundred years already. Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, and all the usual suspects did not simply lack a belief in hyper-inclusive mass democracy and secularism, but firmly opposed it. Taking Rousseau as our example, as he is taken as the philosopher of the French Revolution (the “modern” event in the mythos), the great proto-Jacobin, we can see that not even he (let alone someone like Locke or Descartes) would endorse how far the franchise has been expanded.
“Taking the term in the strict sense, a true democracy has never existed and never will. It is contrary to the natural order that the majority govern and the minority is governed. It is unimaginable that the people would remain constantly assembled to handle public affairs; and it is readily apparent that it could not establish commissions for this purpose without changing the form of administration…Besides, how many things that are difficult to unite are presupposed by this government? First, a very small state where it is easy for the people to gather together and where each citizen can easily know all the others. Second, a great simplicity of mores, which prevents the multitude of public business and thorny discussions. Next, a high degree of equality in ranks and fortunes, without which equality in rights and authority cannot subsist for long. Finally, little or no luxury, for luxury either is the effect of wealth or it makes wealth necessary. It simultaneously corrupts both the rich and the poor, the one by possession, the other by covetousness. It sells the homeland to softness and vanity. It takes all its citizens from the state in order to make them slaves to one another, and all of them to opinion.”1
If the most radical of the moderns was of this opinion, then there is zero chance any of the more moderate or conservative-minded thinkers would be on board. Hyper-inclusive mass democracy? Miss.
What about secularism? The best evidence for this is Locke saying things such as “These considerations, to omit many others that might have been urged to the same purpose, seem unto me sufficient to conclude that all the Power of Civil Government relates only to Mens Civil Interests, is confined to the care of the things of this World, and hath nothing to do with the world to come.”2 However, he, along with Descartes and, more sophisticatedly, Leibniz, felt it necessary to provide rational grounds for believing in the Christian God. Secularists are not usually concerned with providing proofs for the existence of God, as seen in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV sections three-six, usually they, instead, relegate belief in God to a mere fancy that is harmless so long as it does not enter into political matters. It would be a gross misconstrual to jump from Locke’s dislike of sectarian conflict to an accusation of secularism. Logically, it is a jump. Contextually, Locke took time to provide arguments for the existence of God and, perhaps more convincingly, derived his social contract theory from medieval Catholic social teaching.3 Secularism forbids the intrusion of religion into politics, yet Locke brings the Schoolmen right in. Secularism? Also, a miss.
Perhaps capitalism can be laid at the feet of modernity? Typically, it is said that capitalism replaced the medieval system of feudalism. Marx’s account has become the norm, even among those opposed to Marx. Interestingly, the elites locate capitalism pretty far back in the past. In Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley tells us,
“At the beginning, in the early Middle Ages, Western Civilization had an economic system which was almost entirely agricultural, organized in self-sufficient manors, with almost no commerce or industry. To this manorial-agrarian system there was added, after about 1050, a new economic system based on trade in luxury goods of remote origin for the sake of profits. This we might call commercial capitalism. It had two periods of expansion, one in the period 1050-1270, and the other in the period 1440- 1690. The typical organization of these two periods was the trading company (in the second we might say the chartered trading company, like the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, or the various East India companies).”4
Quigley’s reasoning is sound. A marked shift from a “manorial-agrarian” economy (feudalism) to one centered around the import-export of luxury goods can only be called the shift to capitalism. Were entire economies capitalistic in 1050? No, there were still, and will still be for time, manorial estates. Yet, the existence of manorial estates does not nullify the existence of capitalism. Trading companies were not as widespread as they would become, but they existed and were instrumental to forming the elites of that time. Another miss.
If modernity is more than a term of abuse, and if it is something other than hyper-inclusive mass democracy, secularism, and capitalism, then what is it? Beginning with Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method, modern philosophy, and, consequentially, modern thought as such, came to privilege methodological reasoning over personal/experiential reasoning. Humans can get things wrong, and with the Hundred Years War being so recent for Descartes, humans can get religion and its application very wrong. To rely on personal authority leads to religious dogmatism, and to rely on personal experience gives you outmoded physics as in the case of Aristotle. What is needed is to separate epistemology from the subject and bring it into the object. Here is the birth of “subjective vs objective.” What your priest or pastor says, what your own observations of nature are, is subjective. Why? Because these authorities are grounded in the subject, be it the trustworthiness, or competence, of your religious elder, or the trustworthiness of your senses and abstractive powers. Methodology, be it that of Descartes, Locke, Newton, or Kant, is objective. Why? Because the authority of a method is independent of any subject and is grounded in the object called method.
Notice how in Kant’s ethics moral truths are discovered through the application of the categorical imperative. Instead of learning that it is wrong to lie from your elders or the Bible, in Kant’s ethics you discover that lying is wrong by reasoning that if you universalize that behavior then it becomes clear that lying ought to be avoided. Subjective (authority) is replaced by objective (the method of the categorical imperative). It is not only the authority of elders or the Bible that is done away with in favor of method, but also personal judgement. Aristotle’s ethics assumes that the person in question is capable of recognizing when a behavior is in excess (such as brashness) or defect (cowardice), and also capable of determining when that behavior is appropriate/within the mean between excess and defect (courage). This too is done away with in favor of method.
The emphasis on method in modernity has saturated the world to such a degree that it is not uncommon to find “defenders of tradition” and “opponents of the modern world”, railing against subjective morality. Though we can use words differently than has been intended historically, implicit in any condemnation of “subjective morality” is the condemnation of the subject’s ability to correctly ascertain ethical truths.
The Postmodern Critique
Postmodern philosophers have looked at this insistence on method and concluded two important things:
Often these methods were designed to yield specific results (even if not intentional) and, as such, are less methods of arriving at truth and more a mechanism to give credence to previously held beliefs.
The supposed objectivity in method is in fact a type of subjectivity
Locke’s way of ideas curiously undercut many Roman Catholic dogmas, such as Transubstantiation and Purgatory (what sense data could possibly have imprinted these ideas, if we concede that they are clear and precise, on your mind?), Kant’s ethics just so happen to place the rational individual at the center of the moral universe (right in line with most 18th century political theory), and Fichte’s ontology eliminates anything that could stand in the way of a revolutionary intellectual class.
Though this first critique can lift up the foundations of modern philosophy and see beneath it political or religious motivations, its value is only equal to how well someone is familiar with these texts and is suspicious of religo-political motives. If you are not familiar with Locke, Kant, or Fichte, the above paragraph probably did not mean much to you. Or if it did, you might be perfectly fine with religio-political motives driving philosophy; after all, would we not expect someone’s background to influence their thinking? In this lies the second postmodern objection: objectivity is another form of subjectivity.
Insistence on method is historical phenomenon with historical motives, often related to anxieties about relying on religious authorities or personal judgment…those cause many bloody wars between Protestant and Catholic countries. Modern philosophy, and later modern science and modern political theory, was a result of this anxious subject. Although this anxious subject insists that it is objective, the supposed objectivity is simply the way in which the anxious modern subject is expressing itself; quite literally this objectivity is a form of subjectivity. What the moderns tried to eliminate ended up becoming inescapable. On its own terms, modernity fails.
Both of the above critiques can be found in all postmodern thought, which can be characterized as any thought that includes the two critiques. To be postmodern is, on our schema, to 1) recognize that modern philosophy has hidden (even if unintentional) motives and 2) to see that objectivity is another form of subjectivity.
Yet, to critique without giving a positive vision is to complain. We are not interested in mere complaints, and neither are the postmoderns. There is a certain group of postmodern thinkers who, having accepted the above critique of modernity, seek to restore pre-modern modes of thinking. Here we will look at two pre-modern modes: phronesis and the Heraclitan logos.
Phronesis
Accepting the postmodern critique reopens the possibilities closed off by modernity: authority and personal knowledge. Joseph Dunne, in his Back to the Rough Ground, is one of many who takes this invitation to return to personal knowledge.
What is unique about Dunne is that he makes is fore into the subject via his own struggles as an educator. His department, back in the 70s, was directed to incorporate a new model of teaching that promised “spectacular improvements in the quality of our students teaching if only they (and we as their mentors) would use it as a blueprint in planning and conducting lessons.”5 What was being implemented was the “behavioral objective” approach to education, whereby teachers are evaluated according to whether or not they taught the stated objective and the students according to whether or not they met the stated objectives. Many of you were likely taught under this approach.
Dunne became skeptical of this objective based approach for a number of reasons, the chief of which is as follows:
“Much of my skepticism concerned the quality of information that could be provided by these analytic activities for the actual conduct of teaching. A precise statement of objectives, it was claimed, can keep the teacher "on target." But how can a teacher know that the target set is a desirable or appropriate one? For all the exactness of its formulation, how can one avoid its being arbitrary? It seemed clear to me that one can do so only through a kind of judgment and good sense that neither depends on nor derives from a commitment to objectives formulation per se. Moreover, when advocates of the model suggest that objectives-based evaluation provides "empirical evidence" that either confirms that objectives have been well chosen or suggests a reorientation of the teacher's work, this claim seemed no less problematical. For whatever evidence is thrown up by an evaluation about the "learner's post-instructional behavior" will have to be interpreted for its significance with respect to the act of instruction; and guidance for such an interpretation is not forthcoming from this evidence itself. If the initial standards set for instruction were arbitrary, there is no way that subsequent empirical evidence, on its own, could exorcise this arbitrariness from them at a later stage. If, for instance, a teacher fails to achieve her objective, how is this to be interpreted or its significance for her activity to be judged? It could mean that the objective was too difficult for the class and that it should now be scaled down. Or it could mean that it was, in fact, an appropriate goal for the class- in which case her instruction may have been incompetent; and if so, we still have to find out in what respects. Or perhaps- for a complex set of reasons, maybe unknown to the teacher- members of the class were distracted on this particular day from their normal level of attention and achievement. Any number of factors may have intervened to produce the results that the evaluation gave back as empirical evidence. Accordingly, the teacher has to make a complex set of judgments, based on much more than the evidence of the learner's post-instructional behaviors, before she can rationally revise her decisions. Both the pre-specification of objectives, then, and subsequent evidence supplied by the approved form of evaluation would leave answers to the teacher's questions of the form "what shall I do?" massively underdetermined.”6
In his objection to the objective based learning model, Dunne discovered the Aristotelian concept of “phronesis.” Phronesis is usually translated as “practical judgment” or “practical wisdom” and describes a type of knowledge that requires proximity to its object. In the case of teaching, the teacher can only properly evaluate his students if he knows them, their abilities, background, emotional situation, or even more mundane (yet very important) things such as “did Roy get enough sleep last night?” It is not possible, Dunne argues, to evaluate a student unless you know him and know him well for that matter. Note here that Dunne is crashing up against the essence of modernity, the emphasis on method, and striving to overcome it.
Throughout the book, Dunne looks at diverse list of philosophers who, despite their many differences, all place phronesis at the center of their epistemology. A chapter is given to each philosopher, outlining their basic project and bringing to the forefront their utilization of phronesis. Since this is not a book review, nor a summary, of Back to the Rough Ground, we will not give a chapter-by-chapter overview. What is important for us here is to give Jospeh Dunne as an example of a thinker who challenges the methodological essence of modernity and returns to a premodern way of knowing. Dunne is postmodern, not premodern, because he overcomes modernity and while he restores a premodern way of knowing, it cannot be said that Dunne is premodern if for any other reason that premodernity has passed away and is inaccessible to contemporary man. We cannot be premodern any more than we can be medieval, that age has passed, and the critical mark of modernity cannot be wiped away…naivete gone. Any restoration of premodern, or medieval, thinking will ultimately be a type of postmodern alternative to modern method.
Heraclitan Logos
Our second thinker is Christos Yannaras, a Greek Orthodox Heideggerian philosopher and personal hero of mine.
Yannaras’ critique of modernity is broader than Dunne’s, as he sees the roots of modernity going back at least to the 9th Century Carolingian Renaissance. Keeping this in mind, we will bracket the role Western theology might have played in the advent of modernity and focus on what Yannaras has to say about modernity as such. Quoting from On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite:
“…there nevertheless exists among them a common denominator, pushed by Descartes to its ultimate consequences: it is the radical reversal of the Greek understanding of logos—the interpretation of logos as the means of reference and relation, the means of verifying knowledge through experienced relationships (the Herakletian ‘common logos’). The Scholastics and Descartes introduce into human history the interpretation of logos as ratio, and ratio as a self-reliant, subjective capacity, the capacity of individual reasoning (facultas rationis), which is competent to define the truth exhaustively, being as it is but a miniature of the divine mind.”7
Against the autonomous individual reason, which ends up establishing methods by which to “define truth exhaustively”, Yannaras proposes the logos “of refence and relation.” I can only know you by talking with you, spending time with you, and being open to who you are. I can only know who God is through prayer, the mysteries/sacraments, and listening to His Word. I can only know about the natural world by interacting with it and, if the language is permitted, establishing a relationship with it. Knowledge for Yannaras, to use language not found in his text but suggested by it (taken from Martin Buber’s I and Thou), is second-personal. Where modern thought is first-personal, the “I” is following method, postmodern thought is second-personal, where the “I” is addressing a “you”. Implicit in this approach is the hope for a knowledge free of domination, free of subjecting all areas of life to an uncompromising application of method by which all and all are measured by the same “objective” standard.
Through Postmodernity and Back to the Rough Ground with Heraclitus
In an attempt to clarify terms and provide a postmodern critique, we have seen:
What modernity is not
What modernity is
What the postmodern critique is
How the postmodern returns to the premodern
Let us then let go of false ideas of modernity and critique what it really is: the emphasis on method with the stated goal of removing the subject from the center of knowledge. In this aspect the memes are right, modernity does reduce the subject. Another aspect of the meme is also right, modernity does cast doubt on religious authority (as this is a species of human subject). Yet, why modernity does these things—although it is more accurate to say modern thinkers do these things…historical or philosophical periods cannot “do” anything—escapes the meme and even the more serious analyses. For those of us who object to the modern world, if we think the answer is to “return to tradition” then we first need to “go through the postmodern.”
Rousseau, Jean-Jacque. Translated and edited by Donald E. Cress. Basic Political Writings. Hackett Publishing. Indianapolis: Indiana. 1987. 180
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. Hackett Publishing. Indianapolis: Indiana. 1987. 28
Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope. The Macmillian Company. New York: New York. 1966. 43
Dunne, Joseph. Back to the Rough Ground. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame: Indiana. 1993. 1
Dunne, Joseph. Back to the Rough Ground. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame: Indiana. 1993. 4
Yannaras, Christos. Translated by Haralambos Ventis. On the Absence and Unknowablity of God. T&T Clark International. New York: New York. 2005/ 23
"In his objection to the objective based learning model, Dunne discovered the Aristotelian concept of “phronesis.” Phronesis is usually translated as “practical judgment” or “practical wisdom” and describes a type of knowledge that requires proximity to its object."
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this.
Outstanding reasoning. And a very Collingwoodian approach to thinking about philosophy and history, as it should be!