The Formation of the Modern Self

Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant

Felix O Murchadha

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350245464
• eBook ISBN: 9781350245488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Charting a genealogy of the modern idea of the self, Felix Ó Murchadha explores the accounts of self-identity expounded by key Early Modern philosophers, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume and Kant. The question of the self as we would discuss it today only came to the forefront of philosophical concern with Modernity, beginning with an appeal to the inherited models of the self found in Stoicism, Scepticism, Augustinianism and Pelagianism, before continuing to develop as a subject of philosophical debate. Exploring this trajectory, The Formation of the Modern Self pursues a number of themes central to the Early Modern development of selfhood, including, amongst others, grace and passion. It examines on the one hand the deep-rooted dependence on the divine and the longing for happiness and salvation and, on the other hand, the distancing from the Stoic ideal of apatheia, as philosophers from Descartes to Spinoza recognised the passions as essential to human agency. Fundamental to the new question of the self was the relation of faith and reason. Uncovering commonalities and differences amongst Early Modern philosophers, Ó Murchadha traces how the voluntarism of Modernity led to the sceptical approach to the self in Montaigne and Hume and how this sceptical strand, in turn, culminated in Kant's rational faith. More than a history of the self in philosophy, The Formation of the Modern Self inspires a fresh look at self-identity, uncovering not only how our modern idea of selfhood developed but just how embedded the concept of self is in external considerations: from ethics, to reason, to religion.

1 Four faces of the self in the emergence of modernity

All four had a human face, and a lion’s face to the right, and all four had a bull’s face to the left, and all four had an eagle’s face.¹

Facing God and nature out of doubt and anxiety, but seeking truth and tranquillity, it is not immediately apparent which face to wear. This is not necessarily a matter of masquerade – although Descartes and Montaigne before him pondered the state of being masked – but rather of deciding how best to be in the face of things as they are and as they ought to be. To be a self is to be responsible for oneself in the face to face with another. This is to testify as a self regarding the origins, state of affairs and ends of one’s own being. If this becomes a philosophical decision in Modernity or rather if such a decision is constitutive of how it is to be Modern, then this is so because Modernity emerges in and from a crisis of reason, a crisis of faith and a crisis of world.

This triple crisis cannot be simply marked chronologically but rather emerges in different ways through the history of the Modernity. The crisis of world is a crisis of the metaphysica specialis: God, nature and human – not simply a crisis of those three metaphysical domains but fundamentally a crisis of their interrelation. The crisis of faith is a crisis not only of the division of faith into faiths through the Reformation but also characterized by a sense of God as increasingly obscure and distant, removing faith in him of worldly support and correlates. The crisis of reason is a crisis concerning both the limits of reason and its possible limitlessness threatening the very conditions of its own exercise. From its beginnings and for us today, Modernity remains a fundamentally theological question: Is the secularization of reason possible? The question is not, in its origins, an atheistic one. On the contrary, to secularize reason can be understood as the correlate of a passionate faith in God. This is not simply an abstract metaphysical issue, nor is it only an epistemological one: To secularize reason is to disengage the world from God; it is to set faith afloat on a sea of uncertainty.² It is to place the self in a new and precarious position, where happiness and salvation are in play.

The four faces in the chapter title name the four visages of the self which we find in Modern philosophy, based on templates inherited from Graeco-Roman Philosophy and Judaeo-Christian thought: those of Augustinianism, Stoicism, Pelagianism and Scepticism. Each face bears a different countenance, of humility or autarky, of resolve or disinterest. But each is facing forward, seeking in hope or desperation, confidence or anxiety, a new world beyond the crisis of the world out of which the Modern self emerges. Like those faces appearing in Ezekiel’s vision, they carry forward a promise, in this case that of philosophy and the Gospels, into a foreign land, a land in which the frameworks of Antiquity and Medieval Europe were being lost forever.³ These are the faces that face off against each other in the drama of the self, a drama of the stage in Montaigne and of the courtroom in Kant. The self playing the role of itself and facing up to the ideal of what it ought to be.⁴

The aim of the present chapter is twofold: first, give an account of these four ‘sources of the self’⁵ as they developed and, second, explore some of the factors that transformed the reception of these sources in Modernity. To discuss the latter it will be necessary to engage in the debate as to the nature of the emergence of Modernity, whether it is rupture (as Hans Blumenberg⁶ claimed) or secularization (as Karl Löwith⁷ and, more recently, Charles Taylor⁸, argued), the rootedness of the Modern in Voluntarism (which John Milbank⁹ among others has stressed) and its theological origins (as Michael Gillespie has shown¹⁰).

This chapter is divided into four sections. The first discusses the origins and nature of the debate between Augustinian and Pelagian accounts of grace (1.1). The second then outlines the Stoic and Sceptical accounts (1.2). The third charts the relevant conceptual transformations at the origins of Modernity within the context of late Medieval debates (1.3). The final section develops the implications of these transformations for the account of the self (1.4).

1.1 Grace and responsibility

The question of grace, that is, the gratuitousness of human destiny in relation to its ultimate source and purpose, concerning origins and purpose, creation and salvation, is addressed again and again from Martin Luther to Kant. This concerns the economy of the human relation to a God who is not in our debt:¹¹ Given that human beings exist and have their final end in relation to God, what are the respective roles, obligations and responsibilities of each within the economy of that relation? This question concerns the nature of both God and human, the capacity of human reason and will to act well, and the question of the ultimate purpose of human life. All of this was understood against the backdrop of the Christian account of the Fall: the lapsing of human beings, their state of being somehow less than their original – God-given – destiny. In this context humility seems to be the only adequate response to the human condition, a humility scandalized by the presumption of adequacy, the presumption of being capable of reaching the goal of salvation, of being adequate to human fulfilment.¹² The question of grace centres on the issue of the extent to which such a claim to adequation is presumptuous and scandalous. It appears to be so not only in the light of the ‘sinful’ nature of the human being (I will return to this) but also because of the nature of God, as an absolute being to whom the human stands in absolute relation.¹³ Because of the nature of this relation, mediation between the self and the divine is necessary for Augustine, through churches, sacraments and Scriptures. But the opposite conclusion is also possible, namely, that an absolute relation requires the minimum of mediation. In the early modern period this becomes a contested matter, bringing together questions of power, authority, legitimacy, reason and faith.

The Bible narrative purports to tell of the beginning (Genesis) and the end (Revelations) of the human journey, its turns and what gives it purpose. Those who hear the narrative are themselves contained within it: its claim is to give them a place, an origin and a destination. The narrative is revelatory to the extent to which that place, origin and destination cannot be read unaided (or at all) from human experience or the exercise of human reason. It is this that makes it a narrative of faith. As Augustine makes clear on a number of occasions, faith is only faith, if it breaks from the economy of reward.¹⁴ This break is inherent in the delay between giving and receiving, in the uncertainty of the response reflected in the relief of every gesture of thanks. In faith there is only this delay, or rather the act of faith is a living in and with this delay, this (to speak with Derrida) differance.¹⁵ As such, there is no faith without hope. Augustine thinks this under the figure of testing: Faith is forever being tested precisely because its reward is never either complete or certain.¹⁶ The biblical narrative is one of origins before time, before the possibility of exchange and of the promise of an end, which, however, cannot be seen. Faith is aporetic in its trust in that which is believed but cannot be shown.¹⁷ Such faith is not, however, provisional: The martyr dies giving witness to what she asserts to be without worldly reason. If her action had worldly justification, it would be without ultimate reason. As Augustine puts it, in responding to the question of why, if death was punishment for original sin, the baptized still suffered bodily death,

they [the martyrs] certainly could not have won neither victory nor glory in their struggle … if, after the fount of regeneration, saints could no longer suffer bodily death … For if faith sought and received an immediate reward for its works, it would not be tested by means of an invisible prize and so it would not even be faith.¹⁸

Understood from grace, faith is praise and gratitude: the language of faith is neither the constative language of facts nor the performative language that depends on conventional contexts of meaning. Rather, the language of faith always opens up anew to a future without reward and a past without determination. The grace of creation and of the continual providence of God in the world requires constant affirmation and interpretation. Augustine does not so much speak about God as to God, or his speaking of God is a further expression of his speaking to God. As such, his works – the Confessions especially, but not just that work – have a prayerful quality to them. This is not accidental, nor is it simply a stylistic convention. Discourse about God begins at the very origins of sin and the Fall, namely, in the conversation of Eve with the serpent about the words of God.¹⁹ Speaking about God is implicated in an attempt to capture God within constative sentences. But the grammar of Augustine’s discourse is precisely not the grammar through which Friedrich Nietzsche feared God would also inscribe himself in our thinking:²⁰ It is not the language of subject and object but rather the vocative language of address, the language of love and desire. These words of address are themselves responses; they refer back to a prior experience. To address words of love and desire is to address someone, and that someone comes first. This does not mean for Augustine that knowledge precedes desire. This is impossible for two reasons: First, such knowledge would already amount to a form of possession of the divine, making desire and love derivative; and, second, the comprehension of God would mean that the divine being was contained in our understanding, whereas the nature of the desire he is describing is one of acute awareness of not already containing its object. Augustine’s insight is that human beings find themselves in the opposite position: being drawn, enticed, attracted, first addressed, called.

Human existence is characterized by this tension of responding to a prior but constituting call. Augustine’s account of natality and freedom, but also of sin, Fall, grace and election, all centre around this basic anthropological tension and ambiguity. The being with a rational soul (animus) responds not as those living beings without reason (with only anima) do, simply with instinct, but with judgement. Such judgement, however, is not sovereign but rather itself an expression of a nature that is both fallen and open to grace, both wretched and possibly gifted to transcend its own capacities and even the prelapsarian state of innocent humanity. It is, however, in a sense impossible to speak of ‘humanity’ or ‘human’ for Augustine. This is so not so much because of the difference between innocent and fallen humanity, but more so because of the invisible and imperceptible difference between saved and unsaved, between the elect and the non-elect. This difference is invisible because election is an inner turning, of which there can be no conclusive external sign. This has far-reaching consequences, because it in effect means that we cannot speak of a human nature as such, nor of human will or human freedom, but rather different distinct modes of being human, which are either free or enslaved. The contingency of the call is fundamental and decisive.

The first issue here is that of the turn within. Following Plotinus, Augustine develops an account of human origins and ends in terms of a dynamic of inner and outer, of unity and dispersal. Just as for Plotinus multiplicity arises from the ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Four faces of the self in the emergence of modernity
• 2 Montaigne: Sceptical alterity
• 3 Descartes, Pascal and the ambiguity of the self
• 4 Spinoza and Hume on the good life
• 5 Desire, aporia and reason in Kant
• 6 Kant on the heart, evil and grace (starting from Rousseau)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page