The Making of the Modern Identity III

Part IV
The Voice Of Nature

Structure: This part is about the third aspect of the modern moral sources: nature. Some critics toward Enlightenment Deism and naturalism, e.g. Kant’s autonomy theory (chapter 19) and Romanticism (chapter 20) are pictured here. Standard Enlightenment view was seen as one dimensional. What makes life significant is absent here. Seeing this, then, on the one hand, Kant came up with his notion of radical autonomy of rational agent. The life of mere desire-fulfillment is not only flat but also heteronomous. We need freedom to manifest ourselves. The fully significant life is the one which is self-chosen. On the other hand, expressivists came up with their second dimension in nature as source. This view attacks the notion of objectifying (or neutralizing nature) wherein nature is seen as a neutral order of things. This is chapter 21.

Chapter 18
Fractured Horizon

But what is the relationship between cultural developments (life goods) and its philosophical formulation (chapter 18)? It is circular. A tendency to give priority to philosophical formulation is because it is a formulation. That is why we cannot consider the life goods in a culture as self-constitutive good. Also that is why we can speak of some articulations as the ones which fit, which capture the spirit of a certain unreflecting practice. Articulations – thus philosophical formulations - can alter practice. The Deism notion of natural order is an important example of this emergence. This Deism appears as the first step toward unbelieving of Enlightenment figures like Helvetius, Bentham, etc., on the one hand, and leads to modern secularization. Secularization is a term used to describe the regression of belief in God, … and the decline of practice of religion. p. 307-09.

But a question comes into mind: what makes moral sources really available? Look for an answer derived from the ancient view points is not enough. Why not? It is because pagan authors and post-Augustinian inwardness fail to capture early modern moral experience. Also it is because Platonic ontic logos or rational order falls increasingly on the defensive before the advancing mechanistic science. This inadequacies help in describing the alternative moral sources which actually do begin to emerge in the 18th century, and which define our contemporary situation. These (alternative) moral sources can be range into two heads or ‘frontiers’ of moral explorations: first lies in the agent’s own powers, those of rational order and control initially, but later, … be a question of powers of expression and articulation; the second lies in the depth of the nature, in what wells up from my own nature, desires, sentiments, affinities. p. 314.

Modern moral culture comes from multiple sources. It can be schematized in three directions: two independents frontiers (he means human’s dignity as rational agent and nature, p.315) and one originated in theistic foundation (theism). But Taylor explicates that these three are problematic by the fact that they exist in a field of alternative. That is why he calls them as frontiers of exploration. The challenge of inadequavy calls forth continually renewed attempts to define what the dignity that inheres in us as rational or expressive beings, or the good involved in our immerse of nature, consist in. These three directions can be seen as rival, but also as complementary. p.317-18

Chapter 19
Radical Enlightenment.

This chapter is about the mutation by which the thought of radical, unbelieving Enlightenment emerged out of Deism. Radical Aufklärer had no use for the notion of providence, or a providence order. Their ethic was purely based on utility. Locke’s hedonistic theory comes up here in radical form together with his notion of rasa tabula. Speaking about ethic needs not to be started with any appeals to Law of Nature, or Law of Reason, Right Reason, Natural Justice, Natural Equity, Good order, or the like. Rather, it must be begun with the fact the people desire happiness or pleasure and the absence of pain. So the only issue here is how to maximize happiness. p. 321.

The radical utilitarians, on the one hand, rejected the constitutive goods of Deism and the providential order, but on the other hand, committed some life good underpinned by them: 1) the ideal of self-responsible reason; 2) the notion that ordinary fulfillment that we seek by nature not only are what we desire but are worthy of being pursued and furthered; 3) the ideal of universal and impartial benevolence. p. 322.

They embraced materialism and atheism in two meanings: 1) as the ultimate deliverance of self-responsible reason; 2) as the way of being integrally true to the demand of nature. p. 325.

Enlightenment naturalism was radical because of her accent of sensualism. The promotion of ordinary life, already transposed by Deists into an affirmation of the pursuit of happiness, is now turning into an exaltation of the sensual. A dispute between Diderot and Orou is an interesting example of this sensual exaltation. p. 329. Enlightenment naturalism tends to make sense of one’s own moral horizon, by defining three life Good: self-responsible reason, the pursuit of happiness, and benevolence. This idea has to do with the notion that the ordinary fulfillments of human beings have a special significance. Someone who lives these fulfillments clairvoyantly and undistortedly is living a higher live than one, say, who undergoes mortifications in the name of some religious ideal. This significance is from and for the human beings. p. 341. It demands a recognizing of the goodness of ordinary desire. This recognizing empowers us to live this goodness integrally (Nietzsche). This Nietzschean idea helps us – according to Taylor – to understand where the naturalist rejection of religion and traditional ethics comes from, i.e. from this sense of empowerment, of releasing nature and desire from a stultifying thralldom, releasing them to a fuller affirmation. This rejection has two sides: the negation of religion and metaphysics, and the affirmation of the goodness and significance of nature. These two sides bring about two routes in naturalism: 1) inarticulated route of the mainstream naturalism. It is because they think that the first side left no place for the second. 2) Articulated route, more direct and open, hence fuller, release of the stultified power of nature and desire. p.343.

Beside the human’s ordinary fulfillments significant, there also is a spiritual significance of (Enlightenment) naturalism, i.e. a believing that thinking beings are part of a vast physical order. This belief awakes a kind of awe, wonder, even natural piety. According to Taylor, this spiritual attitude is in flat contradiction to the Cartesian dualism. Also it helped to foster a new sense of cosmic time, namely a geological time: not only the immense time scale in which the universe has evolved, but also of the cataclysmic changes which have filled this aeons. p. 347, 349-50.

Chapter 20
Nature as Source

Taylor is speaking in this chapter about some counter-movements of rationalized Deism and naturalism, which see nature as moral source. He chooses J. J. Rousseau and Immanuel Kant and some writers of Romanticism (e.g. Herde, Goethe, Hegel) to picture these counter-movements. He describes the latter in chapter 21.

There are two objections to the standard Deism of the 18th century: first, anti-Panglossian, against is rather rosy, optimistic view of the world; second, anti-levelling, against a too simple view of human will, intent simply on happiness. Enlightenment naturalism took up the first. Rousseau is its famous articulator beside Kant. In Rousseau’s teaching there is no place for the original sin. Nature is good and its impulses are always right. This nature is linked to a voice within, conscience. Conscience is our inner guide. It speaks to us in the language of nature. Austerity is here essential to be an integral and free human being on one’s own. p.358-59. The scope of the inner voice is enlarged here. We now can turn from within us, from the impulses of our own being, what nature marks as significant. And our ultimate happiness is to live in conformity with this voice, that is, to entirely ourselves. This is a kind of self-exploration which makes self-determining freedom the key to virtue. This makes Rousseau the starting point of a transformation in modern culture toward a deeper inwardness and a radical autonomy. P. 362-63.

Kant is a defender of human freedom, of a radical autonomy, taking anti-levelling objection, because freedom (or autonomy) has to have a moral dimension. So he is – as Rousseau – articulating a notion of autonomy. Morality and freedom relate to each other closely. Morality is not any specific outcomes. Moral action is not marked as such by its outcomes, but rather by the motive for which it was undertaken. What a moral person wants above all is to conform his action to the moral law. This amounts freedom, because acting morally is acting according to what we truly are, moral/rational agents. This means that we, the moral agents, are the sources of the moral law. So Kant is giving, according to Taylor, a firm but quite new base to the subjectivism and internalization of moral sources which Rousseau inaugurates. The moral law… comes from within; it can neither longer be defined by any external order nor by the impulse of nature in me, but only by the nature of reasoning. Morality can’t be founded in nature or in anything outside the human rational will. So, Kant offers one form of modern internalization, that is, a way of finding the good in our inner motivation. p. 363-64, 368.

Chapter 21
The Expressivist Turn.

This chapter is about Romanticism, which sees nature as moral source. This was a crucial part of the conceptual armoury in which Romanticism arose and conquered European culture and sensibility. The rights of individual, of imagination, and of feeling were crucial justifying concepts of the Romanticism. It is an inner impulse or conviction which tells us of the importance of our own natural fulfillment and of solidarity with our fellow creatures in theirs. This is the voice of nature within us. Thus, if our access to nature is through an inner voice or impulse, then we can only fully know this nature through articulating what we find within us. This articulation is an expression. To express something is to make it manifest in a given medium (e.g. I express my feeling in my face; I express my thought in words I speak or write). Expression is a kind of creation. It is either a bringing about (or a manifesting) of what already exists or of bringing something to be. Fulfilling my nature means espousing the inner élan, the voice or impulse. This makes what was hidden manifest for both myself and other. Poet and art are the medium where the Romantists express their inner voice. This made expressivism the basis for a new fuller individualism.

Kant’s autonomy theory and the notion of nature as moral source are two reactions to the felt inadequacies of standard Enlightenment Deism and naturalism. But they react in different, incompatible ways. Kant wants to recover the integrity of moral, which he sees in an entirely different quality of motivation. Freedom is the key to the autonomy. But his theory of autonomy makes a radical break with nature: a disengagement in a sense more radical than the naturalistic Enlightenment has envisaged. The second takes a different path. It is also meant to rescue the moral the moral dimension, but this is now to be discovered in the élan of nature itself, from which we have to cut ourselves off. These two are on incompatible courses because Kant’s division of nature from reason seems as much denial of nature as source as the standard Enlightenment view; and the exaltation of nature as a source – in Kant’s eyes – must seem as heteronomous as utilitarianism.

The expressivist philosophy tended to develop a theory of history is a spiral form: from a primitive undifferentiated unity, to a conflictual division between reason and sensibility (human and human), to a higher reconciliation between the second two (human and human and nature). This philosophy has its root in the Christian picture of salvation history: from paradise through the Fall, to the redemption.


4. End Notes

My first impress when I saw this book was that it was a good book, though I didn’t really know what it was about. And it is a good book indeed. It is, however, a difficult book for those who are not familiar in the field of philosophy. Besides, it also is annoying because the chapters have absolutely no titles. This makes the readers uneasy to get the points as soon as possible. That is why I have tried to give – when it is possible – titles here and there. According to me, chapter 12 might be put somewhere in the preface. Because it is about the choice that he has made in describing the modern moral source. I don’t have any clear idea whether Montaigne’s self-exploration can be viewed as derived from Augustine. But I think it might be so with regard to Augustine’s radical reflexivity.

This book is about the modern Western moral (and culture) sources, while I am an Eastern people. So reading this book seems to be – in a certain sense – irrelevant to me. On the one hand, I was engaging with a far away moral and culture developments. On the other hand, however, I see my country is struggling with what Taylor is talking about. I would like to analogize my county – and probably all 3rd world countries – as a good big bowl, wherein everything can be thrown. This means – more or less – that we are not immune toward the developments – culturally, morally, economically, politically, etc., which have taken place in the western worlds. I can divide Indonesian people educatively into two categories: (good or high) educated- and (bad or low or even un-) educated people. Most of the formers are those who have traveled abroad (all over Europe and America) and got their study there. They inevitably have had or learned and are influenced by the western picture of culture and morality. The latter are those who were, are and will be the executors of primitive-, modern-, and postmodern culture. So there is and will be an encounter between these two groups. In this meeting, the high westernized educated one try to apply what he has learned to the bad and low and even uneducated one. This means that Western culture and morality will play an important role and – who knows- will sweep away indigenous culture. Seeing this I am thankful reading this book. The three aspects of Western modernity – the inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and the nature as moral sources - really help me to conceive the moral and culture development in my country. It seems to me that we are living in a complicated mixing of these three aspects. Besides, the battle between Enlightenment and Romanticism is really available among the middle class people of my country. So, what Taylor is saying in the first paragraph of chapter 22.4 is already present in the Eastern worlds as well.

It is not easy to see soon the possible contribution(s) of this book with regard to our Gereformeede apologetiek. What is clear in it is that the (post)modern Western self has its root either in the pagan philosophy (and culture) or in the Christianity (and Islam). So it provides only a ‘kennis’. But this ‘kennis’ indeed is very useful in creating methods to approach this (post)modern or post-Christian people. If Taylor is right in that we are living in time of reconciliation between rationality and sensibility (chapter 21.3), or in a battle between Enlightenment and Romanticism (chapter 24), it means then that we are living rationally and naturally: enlightenment rationalism and romanticism. This can be – in my view – a good ‘kennis’ to reach the people through apologetics. If man can think of any nature and acknowledge rationally that it contains anything good, then it is possible to bring them to God by giving some rationally argumentations dealing with the nature. Apologetics methods such as classical and evidential probably are appropriate here.

The moral sources - as they are appearing through Taylor’s book – give me a new understanding how certain culture and morality has become available. As I just said in the previous paragraph, they are from two great different sources: paganism and religions (Judaeo-Christen and Islam). These two have been developed by great people either philosophically or theologically. Through this book I have come to a better understanding of why people since Renaissance have begun to question radically about who they were and who God was. These than, has brought about Enlightenment and Romanticism, wherein many people of Europe began and begin to turn away from God. I really do not have any answer of the question: why has this taken place after the Middle Ages and has taken its full form in the Enlightenment century? Why not before?

I have tried to sketch the development of the (post)modern Western moral sources as Taylor describes them. It is probably not really accurate but I think it will provide a bit help to those who want to read this book. I have left part i and v, but I hope that I will read them later.