The Making of the Modern Identity II

Part III
The Affirmation of the Ordinary Life.

Structure: Taylor is dealing with the second aspect of modern identity here. He does this by explaining the sources of this aspect in chapter 13. In chapter 14 he speaks about the fusion of ethic of ordinary life and the philosophy of disengaged freedom and rationality in the earlier phase (in the beginning of 18th century?). John Lock was one of the earliest embodiments of this synthesis: bringing together of outlook derived from Reformers (partly from Bacon) with Descartes. Chapter 15 is about moral sentiments (of Shaftesbury and his successor, Hutcheson) an opposition to Locke’s disengaged rationality. Chapter 16 is about the Deism idea of God’s providence. He brings this through a short dispute with Hutcheson’s ethic of benevolence. Taylor, then, ends this part by mentioning some changes which have taken place outside philosophy, i.e. through the movement of the culture in the 17th and 18th centuries in Anglo-Saxon and in France.

Chapter 13 “God Loveth Adverbs”

In this chapter, he describes the source of the modern affirmation of ordinary life. This source is found in some strands of the Protestant Reformation: Calvinism and especially Puritanism. But it has its root in Judaeo-Christianity – the pharisaic idea of living the law which thoroughly permeated the details of everyday life – through Augustine. 13.1 is about the transition of hierarchical ethic to ethic of ordinary life and the source of the latter. 13.2 is about the Puritanism influence in the modern affirmation of ordinary life. 13.3 is about Calvinism and 13.4 is about the Puritan theology as the background of Baconian science, which sees the world or things as instrument to glorify God.

There are two major aspects of the modern identity:
Inwardness (Plato, Augustine, Descartes and Locke, part 2)
Affirmation of ordinary life: the rise of our modern notions of nature has its roots here.
What is ‘ordinary life’? It designates (roughly) the life of production and the family (p. 13). It refers to production and reproduction: labour, the making of things needed for life and our life as sexual beings (including marriage and family).

For Aristotle the activities of production and reproduction play only an infrastructural role in relation to good life. There are two other activities that need to be added to these infrastructure elements, i.e. contemplation and participation. According to him then these two are needed to get the good life’. But Plato underestimates the second, and Stoic views human life as sexual is lesser than contemplation: the sage should be detached from the fulfillment of his vital and sexual life. (p. 211-12)

But the influential ideas of ethical hierarchy exalted the lives of contemplation and participation. The former is manifested in the notion that philosophers should not busy themselves … with the crafts. The latter returned in the early modern times (1st in Italia, and then in northern Europe) with the various doctrines of civic humanism (citizen ethic): life as mere household is inferior to one who also involves participation as a citizen). This citizen ethic is in some way analogous to aristocratic ethic of honour. Also found in … the ideal of corteisie in the mediaeval France Romance and in the ethic of generosity in the 17 century sense. (p. 212)

Transition:
1. Critic of scientific revolution in early modern period: the full human life is now defined in terms of labour and production (not contemplation and participation), on the one hand, and marriage and family life, on the other.
2. Critic against honour ethic (the other main variant of the traditional hierarchical view) from Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Molière. Its (ethic of honour) goals are denounced as vainglory and vanity, as the fruits of an almost childish presumption.

According to Taylor these critics are, however, not new. Plato sees honour ethic as concerned with mere appearance, Stoics rejects it, and Augustine sees it as the exaltation of the desire for power, the libido dominandi. But what gives this new critic its historical significance as an engine of social change is the new promotion of ordinary life: sober and disciplined production took the central place in human life. These two critics cause a transition from the ancient honour ethic (or citizen ethic) to the modern ‘bourgeois’ ethic (view of social order, political stability, and good life). This bourgeois ethic has played a tremendous role in constituting modern liberal society (18th century and beyond), with their: 1) ideal of equality; 2) sense of universal right; 3) work ethic; 4) exaltation of sexual love and family. (p. 214-15)

In the affirmation of the ordinary life man is seen as producer: one who finds his highest dignity in labour and the transformation of nature in the service the life. Marxism is the best known case in this point.

The root of the ethic of ordinary life. The question is then: what was the corresponding account for the various ethics of ordinary life? Or where does the ethic of ordinary life find its root?
· Traditionally, it finds its origin in Judaeo-Christian spirituality.
· In the modern era, it comes from the Reformation (Calvinism and in particular Puritanism (31.2, 3, 4). The puritan idea of the sanctification of ordinary life had analogous consequences for their understanding of marriage. First, this took on new spiritual significance for its own sake; second, it too must never become an end in itself, but serve … God; third, - from Archbishop Cranmer – the avoidance of fornication and the procreation of legitimated children . p. 226

Much of Bacon’s scientific outlook stems from a Puritan background. Some encounter points of both in relation to experience and tradition: 1) Both saw themselves as rebelling against a traditional authority… and as returning to the neglected sources: Scripture and experimental reality. 2) Both appealed to what they saw as a living experience against dead received doctrine. 3) Both rebelled against Aristotelian idea of contemplation.

Bacon’s scientific thesis sounds: the old science (e.g. from Aristotle) is epistemically useless (ending merely in speculative, the verbal, in unresolvable disputes), and it has turned its back on its proper, moral end of enabling beneficent works. This brings about is a shift in the goal of science from contemplation to productive efficacy. This was based on a biblical understanding of humans as stewards of God’s creation. p. 230-31

Chapter 14 Rationalized Christianity

In these chapters (14.1 and ensuing?), Taylor is talking about the fusion of ethic of ordinary life and the philosophy of disengaged freedom and rationality in the earlier phase (in the beginning of 18th century?). John Lock was one of the earliest embodiments of this synthesis: bringing together of outlook derived from Reformers (partly from Bacon) with Descartes. The question is then what does happen with this fusion? 1) In its early form, it retains something of the original theological outlook surrounding the affirmation of ordinary life. 2) Later (toward the end of 18th century), a mutation occurs and a naturalist variant arises (sometimes … anti-religious). p. 234
To a better understanding of this chapter, it seems important to put its contents this way (14.2): 1) the Law of Nature: what is it, and what it contains? 2) God’s revelation: what for? 3) The way to God: reason. 4) Deism, and 5) Grace and natural good.

Ad 1) The content of the Law of the Nature is preservation (in the Second Treatise). Reason (which is the Law of Nature) teaches all mankind not to harm life, liberty and possession of the other. Why? It is because we are made by God. Thus we are his property.

“Everyone as he is bound to preserve himself, and not quit his Station willfully; so by the like reason when his own Preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he van, to preserve the rest of Mankind.” p. 237

Since God gives us life, we go against his will in ending life; unless, of course, this is necessary for its general preservation, which is why we may kill criminals. Locke is following the Protestant affirmation of ordinary life in making human preservation as the central point of God’s will; and that in two aspects: First, Locke integrates into his own thought something like Puritan notion of the calling (as John Dunn has shown). God gives the world to the use of industrial and rational. It is these two properties that God wants us to exhibit. The first requires a hard work, the second, … brings about “improvement”. Second, the Puritan accent on the need to work for the common good appears in Locke teaching as well, i.e. acting rationally: God calls us to act strenuously, and also efficaciously, to meet our needs, but with an eye also to the common good. p. 238-39

Ad 2) God’s revelation (especially in Christ) is inevitable to conceive the Law of the Nature, because human beings have an inherent penchant for irrationality and evil. This is a naturalized variant or form of the original sin. That is why God needs to come. Through his revelation (particularly in Christ), he makes his law known to us; and it is attended by pains (punishments) and reward. So, his revelation helps us to know what is good, and gives us a tremendous shove in the right direction. God gives us some order of life using our self-love (the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain). There are two kinds of self-love: negative: irrational, destructive and wrong form; positive: rational, moral form.

Ad 3) The question is then: how can human beings come to God? The answer is through reason: the exercise of rationality is the way to take part in God’s plan. While ethic of ordinary life rejects ‘higher’ activities and makes the crux of the moral life depend on the manner in which we live our ordinary life, Locke proposes a kind of ‘higher’ activity: rationality. A shift of adverb took place here: from living worshipfully (pure Puritan variant) to living rationally (Locke). We need moral rationality and intellectual rationality. Both are tied together by a primacy of instrumental, maximizing reason. God uses this to lift up us to our full potential. We are morally rational when we allow ourselves to be so lifted up. But this maximizing reason requires that we are to be intellectually rational.

Reason becomes central in Locke’s idea of serving or following and understanding or participation in God’s plan. By doing this, he was plainly stepping outside the orthodox Reformed Theology. This is in accordance with his rejection of the original sin. But what is it mean to serve God? To serve God means to work for the preservation of the ordinary life.

“The goodness and the providence of God are … for the preservation of its [the world] denizens, …. Eternal life, in a world beyond, is something superadded to this benefit; …”. p. 244.

Ad 4) Locke’s naturalism gives birth to Deism: God relates to humans as rational beings; God purposes fully respect for humans’ autonomous reason. Instrumental rationality is our avenue of participation in God’s plan. Rather than seeing this as an abasement of God’s will to the status of a factor in our game, we see it as the exalting of our reasoning to the level of collaborator in God’s purpose. This form of Christian faith incorporates either modern disengagement and procedural rationality or the moral sources they connect with. What are then the constitutive good for this outlook? They are the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the interlocking order; and our disengaged reason as our way of participation in God’s purpose.

Ad 5) Grace tends to have no place. Natural good is “the good that non-depraved human beings can discern on their own and at least set themselves to accomplish it”. (Orthodoxically), there are two ways in which the human natural good was seen as needing supplementation by grace: 1) God calls humans to something more than natural good, to a life of sanctity, which involves participation in God’s salvific action; 2) human will is so depraved by the Fall that humans require grace …. (Taylor calls this as hyper-Augustinian). But Lockean Enlightenment Deism suppresses both. See p. 246-46.

Locke’s picture of the ordered human life … prepared the way for the conception of the high Enlightenment for which Halévy coined in the term ‘harmony interest’.
He is … a crucial figure in the evolution of the ethic of ordinary life from its theological formulation to the modern, “bourgeois” naturalist one. Both facilitated the rise of capitalism. His ethical outlook is … against the aristocratic warrior virtues. p. 239-40

Chapter 15 Moral Sentiments

In chapter 14 Taylor has been talking about Lockean Deism. In this and the ensuing chapters (16, 17) he wants to talk about another variant of moral outlook (partly opposition to that of Locke), i.e. moral sentiments or moral sense (from Shaftesbury and his successor: Hutcheson). He does this by pointing out the theological background of Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury. But before ascribing the Earl and Hutcheson, Taylor gives some notes on Cambridge Platonists, with John Smith as example figure. So, he is putting Smith between Locke and Shaftesbury.

The rise of empiricist mechanism. The difference between Locke and Shaftesbury can be traced to the kind of orthodox Christianity in which they emerge. Locke has root in Puritan orthodoxy, while Shaftesbury in Erasmian (utilitarianism?).

Locke has – in naturalistic sense - a hyper-Augustinian theology of grace, and shares Puritan theological voluntarism (: God’s law is what he decides it is; it determines the good. It is an extrinsic theory of morality). “In naturalistic sense” means that he recognizes human incapability but not in the sense of original sin. Rather, that human beings have propensity of illusion, folly, and destructive behavior. What we need is not grace but rationality. According to Taylor, Puritan Theology teaches that God’s law is external to us fallen creature. This outlook than pushed us toward the adoption of the mechanistic world view. A disengaged subject of empiricist mechanism objectifies the domain in question and renders it neutral. In the neutralized world of the psyche there is only de facto desire; there is no higher good, the object of strong evaluation, within nature itself.
“whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good” (Hobbes).

Cambridge Platonism reaction (protest): e.g. John Smith. But in Erasmian utilitarianism, de facto desire is the basis of the ethic: the higher good … is the maximization of de facto goals. Smith proposes religion of love vs. religion of fear; inward Nature Christianity vs. mechanical Christianity. This Inward Nature is another expression which points forward to a central feature of contemporary culture. Smith attacks here the crux of voluntarism, which makes God’s will something quite external to the bent of nature. This inward nature is platonic. Love plays a central part: not only the ascending love of the lower for the higher (Plato’s eros), but also a love of higher which expressed itself in care fore the lower, which could easily be identified with Christian agap­e.

Erasmian orthodoxy. To know this rival moral outlook to that of Locke, however, we better trace it background through Shaftesbury. Two crucial principles of Deism need to brought in mind here: 1) The central place accorded to the human subject as an autonomous reasoner; 2)The sidelining of grace. The key figure of this moral view (moral sentiments) is the third Earl of Shaftesbury. He got his philosophical allegiance to autonomous reason probably from Locke, but his anti Lockean moral views came from Cambridge Platonists. From philosophical view he was close to Stoic (Epictetus and Marcus).

Love and joy: Love and joy are the highest goods for human. The world is perfect and good; the imperfections and badness are in our opinions. But there is an obstacle to this love i.e. our believing that the world is in some way imperfect and bad.

Providence: Right opinions make us capable of loving providence. All disasters fill the order of things in the world: good needs a foil in evil, partial blemishes work for the whole, the universe has to proceed by general law. This idea becomes standard in 18th century providentialism.

God: As in the Stoic, the third Earl sees God as the framer of this order. He is rather different from God of Abraham, of revelation. He is the mind that not only designs but moves and animates the whole. The way (or our path) to God is our grasping of the universe as a single entity, like a tree, whose parts sympathize, and which is ordered for the best. In contrast to Locke, God’s law is not something external. The highest good doesn’t repose in any arbitrary will, but in the nature of the cosmos itself; and our love for it isn’t a commanded under threat of punishment, but come spontaneously from our being.

Intrinsic and extrinsic moral theory: Shaftesbury’s moral sense is an intrinsic moral theory, while a Locke moral view is extrinsic. Both, Locke and Shaftesbury, embrace autonomous reason and sideline grace, but they diverge in moral views. The former finds his moral views in the dignity of a disengaged subject, objectifying a neutral nature; the latter seeks them (moral views) in the inherent bent of our nature towards a love of the whole as good. p. 254

Natural affection: This is the key term which Sheftesbury always uses. This term reflects two features: 1) the internalization, or … subjectivization, of a teleological ethic of nature; 2) the transformation of an ethic of order, harmony, and equilibrium [Plato] into an ethic of benevolence. p.255-59 for further explanation.

Chapter 16 The Providential Order

In this chapter, Taylor is speaking about the Deism idea of God’s providence. He brings this through a short dispute with Hutcheson’s ethic of benevolence. In Judaeo-Christian tradition, God loves and seeks the good of his creatures. This good had always been defined as consisting in some relation to God: in our loving him, serving him, being in his presence, etc. But in the Deist views, the human’s good is self-contained. God’s presence or intervention for human happiness or goodness is subordinate to the man’s self-action.

The idea that God designs things for the human good took the form of a belief in good order of nature. This was providence, i.e. regular disposition of things. There was no more place for the theistic idea of God’s providence as evident in the orthodox. The Deism didn’t hold that God constantly intervenes miraculously in order to make things work out well for us. For them, the age of miracles was past, and NT stories of miracles were groundless. The goodness of God manifests itself in the beneficence of the regular order of things. God can’t intervene to interrupt the regular operation of the world. Hutcheson seems to find a good answer to the problem of theodicy here. In the Deist views, there were geen wonders en geen heilshistorie. p. 272-73.

But what does it mean to live according to nature? The question of what is meant by living according to nature is answered here. In the ancient, it means life according to reason (kata physin = kata logon), i.e. that we are rational by nature, and hence living according to some notions of order for our good. So, there must be some hierarchical order as in Plato or order of goals as also it is with Plato, Aristotle and Stoics. In our modernity, living according to nature means living according to the design of things. A shift has taken place here: from a hierarchical notion of reason to a conception of providential design (marked activities). This underlines a deep change either in understanding of our moral sources or moral psychology. For Descartes and Locke, reason is our moral source, but for Hutcheson feelings. Sentiments become normative. p. 284 (Taylor’s conclusion).


Chapter 17 The Culture Of Modernity

Some changes which have taken place outside philosophy, i.e. through the movement of the culture in the 17th and 18th centuries in Anglo-Saxon and in France are described here. These changes are cultural, i.e. 1) the new valuation of commerce (17.1); 2) the rise of the novel (17.2); 3) the changing understanding of marriage and family (17.3); and 4) the new important of sentiment (17.4, 17.5, 17.6, and 17.7).

Ad 1) The new valuation of commerce happened in the 18th century, where a new value was put on commercial and money making activities. Where did this change come from?
· From ‘le doux commerce’ and business activity: was supposed to make for more ‘polished’ and ‘gentle’ mores.
· From the encounter between the aristocrat honour ethic and bourgeois in the 18th century.
This new valuation gave birth to the very category of the ‘economic’ in its modern sense. The 18th century saw the birth of political economy, with Adam Smith and the Physiocrats. …..

Ad 2) The modern novel stands out against all previous literature in two aspects: 1) its accentuation on the equality. It reflected and entrenched the egalitarian affirmation of ordinary life. Christian tradition provided an influential alternative here: the Gospels treat of the doings of very humble people along with those of the great with the same degree of seriousness. 2) its portrayal of the particular. It breaks with the classical preference for the general and universal. It narrates the lives of particular people in their detail.

This change expresses and reinforces the demise of the view of the world as the embodiment and archetypes, the world of the ontic logos. The nature of a thing is now seen as within it in a new sense.

Ad) 3 Marriage based on affection. Marriage based on love, - thus not on the desire or decision of the parents as it was in the earlier periods - true companionship between husband and wife, and devoted concern for the children was started among the wealthier classes in the Anglo-Saxon centuries and in the late 17 century in France. Individualization and internalization took a great accent. This leads to a greater place for contractual agreement, and even – in some societies - leads to a greater tolerance for divorce. Personal autonomy, intimate personal relation, the demand and the winning of family privacy gain ground in this period.
Ad 4) Sentiments gain ground in 18th century, again in Anglo-Saxon and French. This is linked to the third. Thus sentiments of love, concern, and affection for one’s spouse come to be cherished, dwelt on, rejoiced in, and articulated. Love and care for children gain a great attention as well. Sentiment takes on moral relevance, and even becomes – for some – the key to human good. This has influenced all Western societies. The novels of Jan Lewis, Richardson (Pamela and Clarissa), Rousseau (La Nouvelle Héloïse) contributed to its intensification and propagation. This age of sentiment is also the age of melancholy, that was propagated by English writers such as Young (a poem: Nights Thoughts) and Gray (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard). The moral important of the sentiment emerges from the growth of the feeling for nature in 18th century. We return to nature because it brings out strong and noble feelings in us, namely feelings of awe before the greatness of creation, of peace before a pastoral scene, of sublimity before storms and deserted fastnesses, of melancholy in some lonely woodland spot. Nature is like a great keyboard on which our highest sentiments are played out. But this relationship with nature is distinct from the ancient one. Here, the affinity between nature and ourselves is mediated not by an objective rational order but by the way that nature resonates in us. In the parallel way, feeling is given a new importance in the religious revivals of the period, among Pietists, Methodists, and Chassidim.