The Depravity of Wisdom

The Protestant Reformation and the Disengagement of Knowledge from Virtue in Modern Philosophy

Mark A. Painter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138342408
• eBook ISBN: 9780429800993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1999, the primary operative thesis of the book is that the Protestant Reformation cemented into Western consciousness a conception of humanity as fundamentally depraved and thus ushered in a conception of human reason far more restricted in scope than that known to pre-reformation philosophy. Though this study is essentially a work in the history of philosophy, it lays the groundwork for an original philosophy of language as well as offering a suggestion for a re-evaluation of Hegel in the light of this approach to language. The book concludes that what was in fact lost in the secular appropriation of the total depravity of man was a conception of reason intimately linked to the assumption that language and the general principles that govern it stand in some way as the guarantors of the correspondence of human thought and institutions and the world at large. At the bottom of this is the loss of the classical understanding of the faculty of practical reason.

1 Reason, Wisdom and Depravity

In After Virtue, Alasdair Maclntyre makes the following claim about the “theistic version of classical morality”, that is, medieval moral philosophy:

To say what someone ought to do is at one and the same time to say what course of action will in these circumstances as a matter of fact lead toward a man’s true end and to say what the law, ordained by God and comprehended by reason, enjoins. Moral sentences are thus used within this framework to make claims which are true or false. Most medieval proponents of this scheme did of course believe that it was itself part of God’s revelation, but also a discovery of reason and rationally defensible. This large area of agreement does not however survive when Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism - and their immediate late medieval predecessors -appear on the scene. For they embody a new conception of reason. . . . Reason can supply, so these new theologies assert, no genuine comprehension of man’s true end; that power of reason was destroyed by the fall of man.

(53)

What remains, he goes on, is a conception of reason that “does not comprehend essences or transitions from potentiality to act”, as an earlier conception of reason did, but one that sees reason as calculative, capable of assessing “truths of fact and mathematical relations but no more” (54). Maclntyre concludes that the Enlightenment, having on the one hand inherited a set of moral injunctions to justify, and yet on the other having also inherited a conception of reason disciplined and limited by the idea that human nature, taken by itself, is fundamentally and in essence flawed, was left ill equipped to develop a coherent moral philosophy. Its own moral values no longer possessed the earlier teleological context wherein a vision of “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-te/os” could be grasped and defended by reason. All that remained alongside these values was a view of “untutored human nature”. Eighteenth century moral philosophy was doomed to fail, says Maclntyre, because its inherited conception of reason was inadequate to move from a description of this untutored state to a justification of its own moral values. Maclntyre contends that we have yet to solve this problem.

What Maclntyre has done with his analysis has broad ranging consequences for the continued exercise of what we can call modern moral philosophizing. However, the fundamental alteration of the west’s orientation toward human nature that Maclntyre speaks of has implications that range far beyond our modern ability to engage in moral philosophy. I wish in the present work to deepen and extend Maclntyre’s mostly suggestive thesis about modern moral philosophy’s adoption of a doctrine of human depravity to include not only its effect on the development and evolution of modern ethical theory, but its effect on the entire seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophic enterprise. I will present the argument that this new orientation toward human nature and the new conception of the scope and limits of human reason that accompanies it severely curtailed modern philosophy’s ability to entertain and provide coherent answers to certain classical metaphysical, epistemological and political problems, as well as moral ones. Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation cemented into western consciousness a conception of human nature as basically depraved and likewise ushered in a conception of reason far more restricted in scope than that known to pre-Reformation philosophy. This not only radically altered the context wherein moral philosophy had previously been conducted, but the context wherein philosophy itself could be conducted and could find legitimacy. As we will see, this conception of human nature as depraved does not survive merely as an assumption that humanity is essentially evil, or merely that reason has limits. Rather, it survives as a conception of the individual as freed from tradition and hierarchy, but unable to access its world and others directly, a conception in which the faculty of practical reason, as distinct from sensibility and pure or theoretical reason, is rendered essentially impotent or is at least severely undermined. Despite great optimism and faith in humanity’s ability to justify itself and its world (particularly in the enlightenment), this new conception of human nature manifests itself philosophically as a peculiar inability to articulate in any precise way humanity’s connectedness to the world, the individual subject’s obligations to other subjects, and the status of autonomous personal identity. As a result, the Socratic ideal of philosophy as a very real, plausible and human pursuit of wisdom becomes not only an incoherent ideal in modern philosophy, but in effect an impossibility, leaving the ideal of wisdom at best a hubristic, naive and unrealistic goal, and at worst a feature of human depravity itself.

Crucial to the thesis presented here is the effect this new conception of human nature and human reason had on philosophy’s understanding of and orientation toward language. With this changed conception of human nature and the philosophical orientation that accompanies it is a reduction of the status of language and its role in linking the human subject to other subjects and to the natural world. This loss of the power of language is one with the limitation of philosophical inquiry to the field of subjective consciousness and is ultimately the central concern of the present discussion. Maclntyre’s description of the effect of the “new conception of reason” on moral thought is analogous to its effect on philosophy as a whole and is helpful in grasping this point about language. Just as moral philosophy inherited a set of moral injunctions that it can no longer coherently justify, so philosophy has inherited a set of philosophical problems and goals - philosophical injunctions, if you will - that are particularly problematic for the modern mind: humanity’s place and purpose in nature, the relationship of mind to body, the status of concepts, how an understanding of the physical world and other minds is possible, the nature of personal identity, and the relationship of human values to natural processes, to name a few. What was in fact lost in the secular appropriation of the total depravity of man was a conception of reason intimately linked to the assumption that language and the general principles that govern it stand in some way as the guarantors of the correspondence of human thought and institutions and the universal principles of nature. For the pre-Reformation mind, language was humanity’s access to the world beyond itself. Its ordering principles were not thought to be limited to human consciousness alone, but rather constituted a map for uncovering order, justice and good in humanity and the world. At the bottom of this, as we shall see, is the loss of the classical understanding of the faculty of practical reason. The ultimate effect of this loss, perhaps most brilliantly manifested in the philosophy of Kant, is that modern thought still suffers from the absence of a sufficiently rich philosophy of language that would free it from the problems generated by the philosophical appropriation of Protestantism’s limited conception of humanity and the philosophical importance of language: the entrapment of philosophy within subjective consciousness and the idea of the transcendental subject. The purpose of the present work is to lay the groundwork for reexamining what in fact reason is by confronting how the Protestant Reformation disenfranchised philosophy from its own original assumptions about the connection between reason and language.

We will accomplish this task by examining what these original assumptions were and how they formed the basis for a pre-Reformation understanding of the ultimate purpose of philosophy. We will then see how philosophy’s secular appropriation of Protestantism carried with it a new conception of reason that greatly diminished the status of language in thought, giving rise to modern philosophy’s entanglement in the problems associated with subjective consciousness and the autonomous individual, a preoccupation that continues to plague both continental and Anglo-American philosophy.

What makes a study of this kind particularly urgent is the fact that it now appears that our long preoccupation with subjective consciousness has led us in contemporary philosophy to a reexamination of the fundamental role of language in thought and experience, in addition to its role in our understanding of philosophy itself, but it is just our preoccupation with the subject that prevents us from fully grasping the implications of what we have discovered about language. What remains is to confront this problem by confronting its origins.

2 Outline of the Problem

First, let us outline the problem that contemporary language philosophy faces today: its confrontation with the modern notion of the self-defining subject. To say that the hallmark of modern philosophy is the problem of subjective consciousness and the development of subjective idealism is not to limit modern philosophy to proponents of some form of subjective philosophy such as Kant or Hegel or some of their successors. It is rather to highlight a central philosophical orientation that has spawned actions and reactions of all kinds, from Hume and Kant to Quine, an issue that more than any other establishes the character of modern philosophical debate. It is an orientation that makes the beginning point of philosophical reflection the perception of the isolated subject - something I will call the subjectivization of philosophy - and it effectively starts with Descartes. In its most basic sense (one closest to its Cartesian beginnings) it is an orientation that takes the human subject, the generic mind, in isolation from circumstance, situation, culture, even embodiment in order to analyze the constituents of what may be called certain knowledge. Its methodology is fundamentally calculative and guided by the principles of logic. Its basic assumption is that what is given in experience, both individual and communal, is prima facie unreliable and requires a rationalist or strictly empiricist justification. Its context is a general skepticism about the world at large and a reliance on the certainty of self-awareness and the principles of calculative reasoning. Its claim to objectivity is built not on the certainty of what it discovers in the world, but on the power and consistency of the internal principles that govern subjective experience. It is as if the ultimate point of reference for the truth is moved from some position outside the subject in the world, against which both individuals and communities may stand, to the subject which stands alone as a focal point for perception. Its relationship to the world and to other minds is primarily a function of its internal state.

This last point is the real source of modern philosophy’s difficulty regarding such things as ethics and metaphysics. If the subject’s relationship to the world and to others is a function of its internal state, the problem of how one ought to act in a given situation or the problem of how one comes to know the first principles that govern things as they are in themselves become matters of contingent facts about the self (that is, empirical facts about human nature, or phenomenological descriptions of human experience), or are dealt with in terms of logico-mathematical formulae, that is, some form of non-empirical rational certainty. The problem is that these central ethical and metaphysical issues, inherited from ancient and medieval philosophy, are difficult to approach within the confines of the subjective consciousness. Modern thought’s general treatment of the role of language in bridging the gap between mind and world is tied up with this conception of human nature.

This basic philosophical orientation has taken many divergent forms, from the empiricism of Locke and Hume to the rationalism of Leibniz and Spinoza. Its tradition reaches an apex in Kant where many of its inherent problems, both moral and metaphysical, are given solution in what has come to be called the “transcendental turn” wherein the world at large as it is in itself (a persistent mystery in modern philosophy) is rendered finally inaccessible and the subject made transcendental. With Hegel we see a kind of final step in this whole philosophical orientation in which the inaccessible thing-in-itself is itself absorbed as a feature of consciousness and the idealized subject is simply taken as all there is, a self-manifesting spirit. But the problem does not end with Hegel and much of western philosophy up to the present is a development of or a reaction to Hegel’s sweeping metaphysics. It is in many ways Hegel’s philosophy and the German idealism out of which it emerged that has brought us to an examination of language and its role in thought and experience.

The self-referential character of modern “subjectivized” philosophy has not only made epistemology the primary area of philosophical investigation, but has made epistemological issues especially problematic. The very question of knowledge seems already caught up in the dynamics of language and this obvious but crucial fact cannot be set aside. And yet our persistent philosophical vision of human consciousness is as an isolated subject, isolated even from its own products, unable to find its place in the general scheme of things, despite Hegel’s attempts to show otherwise. As a result, philosophical hermeneutics, which is representative of most of the basic assumptions of modern continental language philosophy, reaches its own impasse, to which we now turn.

There has been in recent continental work, particularly by Heidegger, Ricoeur, Gadamer and others within the hermeneutic tradition, a movement toward a description of reality as language, opening up the possibility of an ontology of language. Roughly, this description says that being is a kind of meaning, and that meaning is enclosed in a linguistic world. Even analytic philosophy’s descriptive tendencies approach something similar to this, though without the ontological commitment. However, this description of reality with an emphasis on language remains, at present, directed primarily at the structure of subjective consciousness, unable to carry its conclusions outside the subjective human life-world to such things as non-human life or even to the ontological status of the individual subject as it stands in relation to other subjects. The result is a kind of whole-sale, self-referential relativism that takes in the very purpose of the entire philosophical project, a relativism that bespeaks an inconsistency within its very motivations as philosophy. (Hegel, himself the progenitor of this tradition, avoids such relativism, and we will touch on this below, but few if any contemporary thinkers are willing to commit themselves to his all encompassing teleological metaphysics.)

Nevertheless, this hermeneutic approach is the product of careful self-examination, and its arrival at the subject of language is well considered and, in many ways, essentially inescapable. It promises to open up an entirely new understanding of ontology and of the interrelatedness of history, art, science and philosophy. Further, treating language as the fundamental constituent of being has the potential of allowing us an escape from simple subjectivism (i.e., Cartesian subjectivism), and the naive objectivism that rises from it for it necessarily involves a community of speakers. Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that “speaking does not belong in the sphere of the T but in the sphere of the ‘We’“ (Philosophical Hermeneutics 65). But the difficulty lies in the inability to get outside the “We” and define it over against that which is not “We” so as to develop a conception of just what “We” is, something fundamental to the task of any philosophy, as we will see below. This is a problem that stems from a more complex and universal kind of subjectivism, a subjectivism that characterizes modern thought and that limits its ability to conceive of the interrelationship of the representations of the mind and the actualities of the world, actualities against which we may define what a human being is. Gadamer himself condemns such subjective naivete, just as he does objective naivete, claiming that

the agreement about things that takes place in language means neither a priority of things nor a priority of the human mind that avails itself of the instrument of linguistic understanding. Rather, the correspondence that finds its concretion in the linguistic experience of the world is as such what is absolutely prior.

(Philosophical Hermeneutics 78)

It is difficult to grasp the full implications of this and Gadamer himself primarily only explores the periphery of it. The very nature of language such that a correspondence is possible needs further elaboration. Moreover, what becomes of the human subject and its definition against the backdrop of things, given the priority of this correspondence, is unclear. It would be unsatisfactory if the human subject simply became lost in the linguistic dynamics of the correspondence of soul and being. Finally, we need to know the position or status of the finite consciousness that knows this correspondence, the philosopher of hermeneutics. Our problems would not be solved if this approach unconsciously displaces the idealized subject once again. Gadamer may well be able to respond to these problems, but in the final analysis, his hermeneutics becomes enmeshed in itself, in its own historicity, in a circle of interpretation. By itself this would not be a problem; all inquiry must admit its own biases. But there is a deeper problem here that concerns the basic assumptions of the approach as a whole. If correspondence is king and the status of the soul and the thing is subordinate, it would seem that the purpose and perspective of philosophy lies in a stance alienated and displaced from hermeneutics itself, a position inconsistent with this very approach. There is here but a more subtle and complex version of the naivete of the idealized knowing subject.

From the early rationalists to the empiricists and realists, philosophy has been deeply troubled by reason’s inability to cross the gulf between the subject and the object. Continental philosophy has prided itself on revealing the naivete of the attempts of its predecessors to solve this problem. Its taking up of the object as a moment of thought via Hegel and its examination of what makes that moment possible has brought it to a confrontation with language, but instead of opening up a world within which human being may find itself, it has created a world that circles back upon itself in a hermeneutic circle with which it tries to make it own kind of peace. Ultimately we confront only ourselves, converse only with ourselves, and this precludes the possibility of, quite literally, defining ourselves. Despite the potential of philosophical hermeneutics, this consequence has serious implications not only for ethics, but for the task of philosophy itself.

This entrapment within a continually self-referential subjective consciousness has its roots in a Protestant conception of humanity as a creature unable to justify itself within the world in which it finds himself. This limited conception places us in a position in which the goals of philosophy forever outstrip our means of achieving them. It keeps us from taking the next step that Gadamer himself outlines: toward seeing how language in fact necessarily differentiates the subject from its products and so in turn allows us to define ourselves against the cosmos in a way that gives us a vision of our own potential and how to achieve it.

The Anglo-American analytic tradition has also been drawn by its own concerns to language as the arena wherein persistent modern philosophical problems must be dealt with. Most recently this tradition has taken a descriptive position on such issues as morality, the nature of personal identity and the justification of true knowledge.¹ Yet the discipline and rigor of the analytic tradition, with its roots in Humean empiricism and a Wittgensteinian assessment of the truth-value of statements, of necessity paints only one picture of what language is and does, leaving the continental tradition as perhaps the more comprehensive of the two. Still much of continental language philosophy remains entangled, as many analytic philosophies would point out, in its own self-description in linguistic terms rather than freed by it.

Of course, many hermeneutic phenomenologists would reply that only an alienated consciousness - one still trapped in the naivete of objectivism -would think that the relativism that results here is onerous; it merely lays down the groundwork for exploring, as Gadamer says, “the truth that we are”. The fact that the findings of such a project would be relative to time, culture, and, of course, human...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Reason, Wisdom and Depravity
• 2 Outline of the Problem
• 3 Language and Moral Justification
• 4 Luther and the Nominalists
• 5 Practical Reason
• 6 The Effect of the Loss of Practical Reason
• 7 Conclusion
• References