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PART I – Modernity as a Hermeneutic Problem

I should thank the organizers at The Immanent Frame for hosting a forum on

Minding the Modern and all respondents for their participation. As expected, the

forum has not just yielded considerably divergent appraisals, but has also revealed

respondents’ often strikingly disparate assumptions about what it means to engage

a large-scale intellectual narrative. Clearly, to proffer such a narrative is a risky

proposition in an academic environment characterized by ever more minute forms

of specialization and by an often proprietary view of the knowledge produced

under such conditions. Since restrictions of space make it impossible for me to

address each response with the detail that one might wish for, a broader, thematic

approach seems the best alternative. Hence my response to the various statements

posted at this forum will be divided into three parts: the editors of The Immanent

Frame have kindly agreed to publish the first two parts of my response and to

create a link to the third. This first part attends to some of the more focused,

informed, and searching questions about Minding the Modern raised by Thomas

Joseph White, Mark Alznauer, Brad Gregory, and Charly Coleman. In the second

part, I respond to criticisms of my reading of Thomas Hobbes and the fairly

widespread tendency to enlist him as a progenitor of the liberal, pluralist, and

individualist modernity in which we find ourselves. Next, inasmuch as this forum,

taken in the aggregate, has yielded a revealing, if not altogether reassuring,

snapshot of the current state of our intellectual culture, Part III addresses some

larger, structural concerns not only raised in my book, but also reflected in the

responses it continues to elicit. At issue here will be fundamental assumptions

driving not just the responses to Minding the Modern but more generally shaping

current intellectual practice, and what it means to engage the competing ideas,

interpretations, and intellectual narratives of our peers. – Finally, in an addendum, I

am offering a previously published rebuttal of Borja Vilallonga’s comments on

Minding the Modern.

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Minding the Modern is a work of philosophical and theological hermeneutics. It

traces the development of a handful of key humanistic concepts (will, person,

judgment, action) in Western intellectual culture, from Plato and Aristotle forward

into the early nineteenth century. What the book is not, and does not purport to be,

is a linear and continuous narrative of social or even philosophical history. Neither

is it a Rezeptionsgeschichte on the model of the Constance School, which traces

the popular reception and dissemination of ideas. As Brad Gregory observes, “how

ideas were received is not Pfau’s principal concern.” As an eminent historian of

early modern Europe, Gregory understandably regrets that my narrative does not

embed ideas more fully in their complex and often volatile historical moment.

Similarly, Paul Peterson would have preferred if Minding the Modern had focused

on socio-historical contexts, such as tensions between popular religious culture and

the late-medieval Catholic magisterium, on John Wycliffe, the Lollards, Jan Hus,

Martin Luther, the Anabaptists, and so forth. Fine studies of this kind do exist,

though important work by Caroline Bynum, Eamon Duffy, Brad Gregory and others

reminds us that there is no obvious consensus as to how to interpret “the

transformation of social, political and economic structures in the late middle ages.”

Given that several respondents remark how awareness of these structures “[is]

important for understanding the emergence and development of the intellectual

framework of modernity” (Peterson), it makes sense to begin by addressing this very

question: what agency, if any, a hermeneutic project may legitimately ascribe to

ideas. Yet even to raise that question reveals it to be prima facie philosophical, not

historical, in kind. To stipulate that we cannot appraise the thrust and significance

of ideas and concepts independent of the historical context supposed to have

generated them means preemptively to subordinate philosophical and theological

hermeneutics to historical narratives. Yet such narratives don’t just write themselves

but rest on myriad interpretive choices. The very labor of specifying and rendering

intelligible historical contexts—both for those inhabiting them and for historians

belatedly returning to them—actually presupposes conceptual frameworks (not

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necessarily explicit) on which all hermeneutic practice depends. Hence, if (as Brad

Gregory points out) Minding the Modern mainly “deploys ideas as agents,” that

approach should not be preemptively rejected as the spurious fruit of esoteric

intellectualism or as a questionable heuristic fiction.

Rather, my approach is shaped by the conviction that our inevitably fluid, complex,

and often bewildering socio-historical reality will disclose its distinctive features,

tendencies, and significance only where it is (pre-)filtered through various narrative

and conceptual frameworks. It is true, of course, that in their very application to

that reality, these frameworks themselves are in turn subtly and, on occasion,

massively altered. Nonetheless, I maintain that such frameworks logically precede

the historical situation to which they are applied. On rare occasions, conceptual

and narrative frameworks may be rendered unusually explicit by the work of

philosophical or theological reflection. More frequently, though, they constitute a

received and oblique “tradition” whose tacit efficacy has been variously

characterized as “implicit reason” (John Henry Newman), “background

awareness” (Michael Polanyi), “pre-judgment” (Hans-Georg Gadamer), or simply

as a tangle of narratives absent which living and breathing human beings would

remain bereft of all perspective on their existence (Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles

Taylor).

Hence, if one recognizes that the ability of individuals and communities to achieve

an implicit or fully considered grasp of their very existence pivots on the

availability of antecedent, narrative and conceptual frameworks, this allows for a

study such as Minding the Modern to proceed as it does: namely, as a hermeneutic,

rather than socio-historical, analysis of specific conceptual resources and their

transformation over time. A bona fide interpretive engagement of that process

allows us to close in on the discrete features and tensions intrinsic to concepts of

human agency while also being alert to the tangled and dialectical character of

their transmission and inflection over long stretches of time.

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In his response, Mark Alznauer inflects this contextualist credo—one of several

disciplinary axioms scrutinized in Minding the Modern (425-27)—in interesting

ways. As he suggests, breaks and tensions within modern conceptions of will and

personhood are mainly a function of a “new set of questions and concerns” arising

from changed circumstances. For Alznauer, my account of Hobbes fails to

acknowledge the latter’s confrontation with “the complicated problem of

reconciling modern scientific views of nature with our belief in human freedom.”

Now, even though I expressly remark that Hobbes “no longer operates within a

Renaissance humanist framework but, instead, emulates the impersonal methods of

Baconian science and a model of efficient causation pioneered by modern physics”

(197), Alznauer has a point. For my reading of Hobbes does indeed not concede,

as Alznauer implies we must, that the new science of physics inevitably and

decisively changed the basic concept of human agency. This is a serious and in

many respects persuasive view to take, one that I will take up in the second part of

my response.

For now, I can only attend to the conceptual tension underlying objections such as

Alznauer raises here. That any conception of human agency takes shape within its

own particular historical context is, of course, as true for Aristotle or the Stoics as it

is for Hobbes or David Hume. Yet this being so does not license the conclusion

that the object being explored will each time be a different one. Here again

Newman’s concept of “development” (explored in Chapter 3) becomes relevant.

On his account, historical “difference” comprises discrete attempts at articulating

the same idea. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s distinction, in his 1815 Logic,

between difference as “variation” (Unterschied) and sheer “disparity”

(Verschiedenheit) is helpful here. The historical specificity of meanings is no

warrant for asserting their radical discontinuity. Euclidian and post-Euclidian

geometry offer different conceptualizations of the triangle; they do not talk about

different triangles. To suppose otherwise is to commit to a radical nominalism that

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forecloses on both, the possibility of making our own conceptions intelligible to

others and, in turn, learning from others placed in different circumstances.

As I argue in Chapter 2, in framing the past as a correlate of strictly archival

industry, a strict historicist approach to philosophical and theological ideas

inevitably obscures the fundamental continuity of problems and meanings whose

articulate engagement must be at the very heart of all humanistic inquiry in the first

place. I thus cannot agree with Mark Alznauer’s premise that the questions

animating intellectual history are themselves discontinuous. What Minding the

Modern means to reclaim is the distinction, found in pre-modern, Realist thinkers,

between the trans-historical integrity of essences (Plato’s beautiful, good, and true)

and the historically conditioned and necessarily imperfect ways of rendering these

realities intelligible and giving them institutional expression. It is in the very nature

of humanistic concepts to straddle the boundaries between a non-contingent truth-

value and its historically variable and often unstable instantiation.

Alznauer correctly notes that Minding the Modern sees pre-modern and modern

thinkers “attempting to answer the same question … but coming to radically

different answers.” Yet to him this is a mistake because “in response to changing

questions” modern philosophy, beginning with Hobbes, is essentially describing a

different kind of agent, substantially unrelated to Aristotelian phronesis. Now, my

framework is not outright Aristotelian but incorporates important Platonic and

Augustinian-Thomist elements. Moreover, as Minding the Modern repeatedly points

out, these classical accounts retain enormous influence on modern thought,

whether recognized or not. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Hume, and Immanuel

Kant retain important Stoic motifs; elsewhere, I have made similar points about

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Likewise, Kant also retains important Platonic elements

(especially in his understanding of ideas), as Samuel Taylor Coleridge never tired to

point out; and Hegel above all is almost unintelligible if we fail to see him

engaging the Aristotelian and Plotinian legacy. Contrary to Alznauer, then, I do not

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take it as a given that our situation is so radically different that intellectual traditions

prior to the seventeenth century have suddenly been drained of all relevance. In

fact, a central feature of Minding the Modern is to emphasize the costs of such self-

inflicted conceptual amnesia, the claim being that our intellectual resources today

are so impoverished at least in part because we have allowed that assumption to

take hold.

Far more clearly than most other respondents, Thomas Joseph White recognizes

that Minding the Modern neither dogmatically asserts some putatively timeless

view of the “truth” intrinsic to these conceptions nor nostalgically laments their

apparent erosion in the modern era. That said, White is right to express concern

about the fact that I do not confront how “the discoveries of particle physics and

evolutionary theory” have arguably challenged the framework of Aristotelian

teleology, nor some of the “sophisticated answers” devised by modern Thomists

responding to that challenge. Considerations of length and concerns over a

potential distortion of emphasis prompted me not to incorporate materials on

teleology in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, as well

as an engagement with Robert Spaemann’s and Reinhard Löw’s superb work on the

changeful history of teleological thinking.

White’s second query strikes me as arguably the most substantive and difficult

question raised about Minding the Modern in the entirety of this forum, and I do

not think that I have a satisfactory answer to it. As I understand White, the question

is whether Aquinas’ mainly analogical account of God as the ontological

foundation of rational agency precludes actual proof of God’s existence or is itself

complemented by some such proof elsewhere in Aquinas’ oeuvre. The first

position, which White finds me espousing in my book, risks approaching

rationality, teleology, and the intellectual virtues (above all prudentia) strictly

through “the medium of faith” and, in so doing, to commit to a “fideist” position

that ends up looking “more voluntarist and irrationalist than [I] might wish to

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admit.” I am grateful to White both for the precision with which he defines the

problem and for his (to me) persuasive suggestion that we might recover from it

through “an even more pronounced retrieval of the philosophy of being,

personhood, and God.” I wholeheartedly concur with his closing observation that

“a healthy tradition is also one that insists perpetually on the integral structure of

philosophical analysis in the domain of religion.” Yet in a culture as un- or anti-

intellectual as our own, such a project will almost certainly be confined to a highly

circumscribed community of thinkers and its highly technical, not to say esoteric

languages of inquiry; and on those rare occasions when such inquiry reaches the

wider public, it is bound to be met with a mix of incomprehension, indifference,

and misconstrual. Furthermore, hostility to rigorous philosophical engagement with

religion and theology also characterizes many established and emergent domains

of the academy (e.g., most forms of contemporary philosophy, historiography, and

literary, gender, and cultural studies, to name but a few), as well as much of

contemporary Christianity (including Catholicism), whose dominant evangelical

and charismatic inflection has largely supplanted or marginalized a once robust

commitment to philosophical theology. In this regard, the intellectual and

philosophical culture of contemporary Judaism strikes me as far more vibrant and

meaningfully integrated with its practice.

Aside from White and Alznauer, Charly Coleman is the only respondent to

acknowledge the significant investments of Minding the Modern in ancient

philosophy. His point that “it should give one pause that Plato’s Republic advocates

eugenics … or that Aristotle and Aquinas, despite their commitment to fulfilling the

promise of human personhood, also justify slavery” is well taken. Precisely for such

reasons, and following Newman and Gadamer, my account of intellectual

traditions emphasizes the evolving, progressively clarifying structure of intellectual

discovery. Far from being idols of mindless reverence, intellectual traditions live

and are significantly altered by each successive attempt of individuals and

communities of learning to inhabit them in a struggle for genuine comprehension.

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It would help to know whether Coleman concurs with this last statement, or

whether he regards the partial blindness afflicting all past intellectual efforts as a

warrant for their present, wholesale expurgation.

Coleman’s misgivings about my overly monolithic treatment of the Enlightenment

are understandable. Certainly, it is true that Minding the Modern limits itself to a

narrow slice of English and Scottish social and moral theory, and that the resulting,

highly selective narrative may not well accommodate writers like Jacob Vernet or

Denis Diderot. It bears keeping in mind, however, that Rousseau, for one, was

sufficiently troubled by the drift of Rationalism, Materialism, and the Encyclopedists

to pioneer a powerful, if also highly problematic, critique of the French

Enlightenment in its own time. Still, Coleman’s objection stands, and I can answer

it only by reiterating that my argument does not purport to offer a continuous and

all-encompassing history. Rather, my narrower and forensic focus on Mandeville,

Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith was meant to trace one strand of reframing human

agency within aggressively naturalist and proto-reductionist terms. That this

tradition exhibits such striking continuities with twentieth-century behaviorism and

recent, neuroscientific reductionism arguably justifies lifting it out of a rather more

complex web of concurrent and, at times, competing versions of Enlightenment

thought.

PART II – “The Fantastic Mr. Hobbes”

Some readers of Minding the Modern have been surprised to find my account so

firmly critical of Thomas Hobbes on will and personhood. Now, it is both

incidental and inevitable that my reading challenges recent attempts to claim

Hobbes as a precursor of modern liberalism and individualism. Long before me, of

course, a wide and diverse array of thinkers (Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre,

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Charles Taylor, John Milbank, Louis Dupré, Michael Oakeshott) had probed the

conceptual weakness of modern Liberalism, particularly its propensity to expire in

an omnipresent state, putatively enlightened and benevolent as it orders and

controls individual and social life at every level. If my reading of Hobbes casts

doubt on some of modern Liberalism’s cherished axioms and aspirations, this only

points to a certain lack of discernment among those who would identify Hobbes as

a heroic precursor of an enlightened, secular, and liberal politics, of whose lasting

benefits they remain unshakably persuaded. That said, political theory is not a

principal concern of Minding the Modern, whereas putting analytic pressure on

modern philosophy’s assumptions about human agency, rationality, and volition

very much is.

It is presumably because Hobbes’s assumptions here have been assimilated by a

fair number of twentieth-century political philosophers that some readers of

Minding the Modern have homed in on this part of my narrative with such

neuralgic intensity and exculpatory zeal. The dominant strategy here is to blunt my

critical account of Hobbes on personhood with references to the supposedly

unique situation and constraints within which he developed his theory of human

agency and political community. Thus Mark Alznauer insists that “Hobbes’ theory

of agency is an answer to problems that emerged in the seventeenth century, …

[and] this is a new question.” Only by subscribing to a radically particularist,

nominalist view of history can one suppose that a theory of agency can, let alone

should, be tailored to its putatively unique historical circumstances. For my part, I

very much doubt that human nature abruptly changed in the year 1651 any more

than “on or about December 1910,” as Virginia Woolf so breezily proposed.as

Virginia Woolf so breezily proposed.

Still, Alznauer’s concerns are echoed by other commentators and, for that reason

alone, deserve further consideration. Paul S. Peterson insists that “Hobbes tried to

offer solutions to the problems of civil and political disorder, war and violence.”

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More cautiously, Charly Coleman simply notes that on my account, “Hobbes

should not be approached first and foremost as a political theorist engaged in

desperate reflections on how the intellectual formalism of Aristotelian categories

might have conditioned the brutal theologico-political conflicts of the English Civil

War.” This fairly summarizes my general take on Hobbes, though common sense

alone would suggest that Hobbes’s Leviathan is best read in the context of political

and confessional divisions wrought by Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych

Zwingli, and a strident counter-Reformation ethos emerging in the wake of the

Council of Trent, rather than against the backdrop of a (supposedly calcified)

Aristotelianism and a Thomism filtered through Francisco Suarez and Thomas

Cajetan. Crediting me with awareness of these ambient factors, Coleman observes,

not inaccurately, that my reading “seems to downplay the practical side of

Hobbes’s work.”

By contrast, Victoria Kahn not only stresses the insistence of political and military

strife in Hobbesian thought but, in thoroughly question-begging ways, invests these

contexts with determinative powers: “if you leave out the reasons for Hobbes’s

description of human nature, then Hobbes can be described … as incapable of

giving reasons for his ‘practices, values, and commitments’” [italics mine]. Of

course, Hobbes’s project is profoundly informed by his historical context. Yet to

invest these contexts with determinative force, as Kahn’s phrases it, is to turn

Hobbes into an intellectual Jack Bauer of sorts, forever buffeted by states of

exception and breathlessly assuring himself and his more gullible listeners that “we

don’t have a choice” but to adopt the most extreme measures.

For my part, I remain unconvinced that modern social reality and, indeed, human

nature under these conditions is as new and unprecedented as Hobbes and,

following him, Alznauer, Peterson, and Kahn suppose. Warfare, social unrest,

political strife, violent religious dispute, and tensions between secular and religious

authority are not uniquely modern phenomena. Yet should we suppose them to be

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so, this would only confirm that the religious and political strife culminating in

mid-seventeenth century Europe was an entailment of the Reformation’s abrupt

shift toward individualist forms of religious belief as self-authorized and self-

justifying. If fully contextualized within its supposedly unique time, Hobbes’

philosophy becomes itself prima facie a perhaps unwitting entailment or “reaction

formation” to a post-Reformation world whose inter- and intra-confessional strife

had profoundly undermined the authority of political and ecclesiastic institutions.

Indeed, the claim that context has an overriding, determinative impact on our

practical reasoning—a position Brad Gregory wisely avoids—constitutes itself a

distinctly modern assumption. As an argument, it is also question-begging, non-

falsifiable, and logically self-defeating.

That said, Brad Gregory is certainly right to point out that Minding the Modern

leaves “unasked” the question “why political stability and coexistence were

Hobbes’s central concerns in a way they were not for any medieval thinker.” Yet

there are at least two fundamentally different answers to that question. One

(perhaps Gregory’s answer, and evidently the one that Kahn, Alznauer, and

Peterson would give) is that Hobbes was contending with civil strife in a vastly

greater scale than, say, communities in thirteenth-century Italy. The other answer,

which strikes me as both theologically and historically more apropos, would be

that unlike Hobbes, medieval thinkers never harbored illusions of total control of

the kind Hobbes was so intent on securing over the refractory inhabitants of the

saeculum. In fact, war, famine, and wide-spread depredations visited by land-

owners and princes (worldly and ecclesiastic) had rendered quotidian existence in

late antiquity and the middle ages scarcely less precarious than for the average

citizen in 1640s England. Those in doubt might want to reread Dante’s Inferno.

So the key antithesis is not that between the putatively peaceful and well-ordered,

pre-Reformation world and an early modern political world caught up in a

supposedly unprecedented “state of exception” of the sort not just licensing but

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positively compelling Hobbes’s draconian prescriptions. Rather the underlying

difference reflects scholasticism’s insight, particularly in its Franciscan inflection,

into human agents’ essentially sinful, suffering, and imperfect nature and the

irremediable constraint that unalterable fact places on the formation of moral and

political communities of any kind.

That the reclamation of Hobbes by proponents of a firmly liberal-secular politics

should have involved such strenuous contextualization is in no small part due to

Hobbes’s own elision of who, precisely, he is responding to. Thus, in response to

my claim that Hobbes is a direct descendant of Ockham’s voluntarism, Alznauer is

certainly right to point out that Hobbes does not mention Ockham; nor, one might

add, does Hobbes mention, let alone engage, pretty much any other prior thinkers.

By contrast, Thomas Joseph White concurs that “the influence of one [Ockham]

upon the other [Hobbes] is undeniable.” Indeed, few things are more symptomatic

of Hobbes’ view of reasoning as a fundamentally declarative rather than dialectical

endeavor than this near total absence of any acknowledged, past interlocutors in

the Leviathan. It reflects an axiomatic view, one that Hobbes notably does not—

indeed cannot—prove: of intellectual tradition as so much dead weight, something

not concretely engaged but alternately ignored or repudiated wholesale in favor of

a radical naturalism. Hobbes’s metaphysics thus cannot be located in his specific

claims but, instead, must be traced to his unspoken assumptions about how truth in

the domain of human reasoning is to be achieved.

Kahn evidently means to offer us a kinder and gentler Hobbes, one whose “account

of human nature is designed to persuade his readers to assent to his account of

political authority.” I see no problem with attempting such a reading, and I readily

concede that by temperament and in light of her intellectual allegiances Kahn is

well positioned to undertake it. Yet her notably question-begging characterization

of Hobbes account of human nature as “clearly a rhetorical fiction” (italics mine)

strikes me as unpersuasive, just as it did not convince most of Hobbes’ successors

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(John Locke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson,

Immanuel Kant, to name but a few). As William Junker has noted, Kahn’s claim that

Hobbes’s “rational argument” for sovereignty is grounded in “a rhetorical fiction” is

a case of having one’s cake and eating it too. Either Hobbes “offers a rational

argument for the truth of this fiction or he does not. If he does, then his materialist

or mechanistic account of human nature is not just a rhetorical fiction. But if he

does not, it follows trivially that he gives us no reasons to believe that his fiction is

true in the relevant ways.” It would also follow that we have no particular reason to

buy into his account of human nature or, for that matter, his account of sovereignty

supposed to contain such nature.1

Similarly, Kahn’s endorsement of Hobbesian reason as something “attained by

Industry, first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and

orderly Method in proceeding” strikes me as poorly thought through. Hobbes here

gives us a prima facie instance of the short-circuiting of conceptual traditions that

Minding the Modern diagnoses as the distinctive problem of modern thought. What

better example of a presumption to “have all those cards,” to recall Kahn’s opening

conceit, than such a voluntarist “imposing of Names.” Like those rather too eager

to claim him as a precursor of modern Liberalism, Hobbes never seems to grasp

that “to name a thing is to begin an adventure in manifestation, not to conclude it”;

such critical insight into the limitations of his “good and orderly Method” of

“reckoning,” however, is foreclosed by Hobbes’s overriding fear of robust

disagreement about the sources of political and spiritual obligation. It will not do to

urge, as Kahn does, that the sovereign’s power is sanctioned only by supposedly

joint and equitable “deliberation” of the political contract that is to bind sovereign

and subject to each other. For Hobbes’ account allows this “labor of deliberation”

to get underway only after questions concerning the ends and goods for the sake of

1 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2014/10/17/stacking-the-deck-thomas-pfaus-strange-history-of-the-west/comment-page-1/#comment-1156841

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which a political community exists have already been excluded from the

negotiations over the political contract. Such conceptual and political “stacking the

deck” is a distinctively modern, un-dialectical modus operandi.

It is this naturalist framework, loosely extracted from the emergent science of

modern physics, that Hobbes decrees, without argument and with only minor

adjustments, to be the sole adequate conceptual scheme for understanding human

agency. It is, frankly, inconceivable to me how anyone who has read, Aristotle’s

Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, or say Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on the passions,

could possibly consider Hobbes’ account of human agency as an advance in

enabling human actors to navigate a "social situation" that has supposedly

undergone radical change. Unlike Alznauer, I do not assume that conflicting views

of “what is most important in life” are an exclusively modern phenomenon.

Athenian democracy, Sophocles’ Antigone, deliberations over the highest good and

the appropriate course of action throughout the Iliad, or the focused debate over

the moral status of wealth in late antiquity (recently unfolded so vividly by Peter

Brown), tell a nearly obverse story. Where so-called pre-modern political

philosophy and theology differ is in their insistence that competing notions of value

must be rendered intelligible rather than quarantined in the non-cognitive recesses

of “personal preference,” “privacy,” or identity-based rights claims.

From the outset, precisely such practical reasoning is short-circuited and prejudged

in Hobbes’ Leviathan by an apodictic insistence on the efficacious and

unchallenged nature of sovereign power. This overriding priority of keeping at all

times a heavy lid on the bubbling cauldron of civic and religious strife is simply

imposed as a premise but, notably, is not argued per se. For Hobbes to justify the

“expedient” of sovereign power, a new account of human agency is needed, one

so monolithic and dire as to admit of no other solution. To be perfectly clear, my

reading of Hobbes does not contend that his account of human agency is

different—by dint of (supposedly) radically changed socio-political context—but,

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rather, that it is wrong. It is wrong because its underlying, mono-causal axioms fly

in the face of any remotely plausible phenomenology of how human beings think,

deliberate, judge, second-guess, feel, doubt, love, hope, and are invested in so

much more than the realization of their feral impulses and hedonistic longings.

That Hobbes was concerned with the distressing state of English political and

religious life is plain enough; and that his reasoning, however troubling, arises from

a genuine desire to redress this situation also strikes me as true. Still, many

revolutions (in thought no less than deed) have come to grief over their shoddy

assumptions about human agency.

As I argue in Chapters 2 and 14, historicist and contextualist models of explanation

typically prove inconclusive because they often skip over the hermeneutic struggle

with a specific text and, instead, presuppose some particular interpretation that is

subsequently presented as arising, as it were by default, from the contextual forces

that scholarship reconstructs for us. Indicting the manifestly failing Communist

ideology of “progress” of the 1970s, Vaclav Havel (as recently quoted in the

October 2014 Times Literary Supplement) pointed out a disconcerting explanatory

pattern whereby the political authorities of his time would seek to disarm and

dispel manifest and widespread local failures of their particular version of

modernity by insisting that, seen within a larger context, all was well and getting

better yet:

The praiseworthy attempt to see things in their wider context becomes so

formalized that instead of applying that technique in particular, unique

ways, appropriate to a given reality, it becomes a single and widely used

model of thinking with a special capacity to dissolve—in the vagueness of

all the possible wider contexts—everything particular in that reality. Thus

what looks like an attempt to see something in a complex way in fact results

in a complex form of blindness. For if we can’t see individual specific

things, we can’t see anything at all.

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Context per se is obviously not a uniquely modern phenomenon. What is distinctly

modern, however, is the invocation of “context” to mask a hermeneutic laziness

that prefers to dilute conceptually weak argument and shoddy premises by

appealing to broad contextual forces as their logical and rational cause. Hobbes

certainly embodies this tendency of modern thought to license its dramatically

altered descriptions of (and prescriptions for) social reality by declaring itself to be

confronting unprecedented situations. Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” is not just

a shrewd political trope but, in the realm of thought and intellectual argument, has

repeatedly served as the preferred, in essence nominalist, rationale for suspending

all dialectical engagement with intellectual traditions. The assumption—running

strong in Hobbes and plainly fueling some of the critiques of my reading of the

Leviathan—is that “to make sense of modern political and social life” we must

reenact Hobbes’s preemptive disengagement from intellectual traditions and adopt

his unilateral and severe remedies for the crises afflicting modern political

community. It is precisely this web of self-certifying assumptions that prompted me

to remark how modern instrumental reason “effectively creates the explanatory

burden that [its representatives] take themselves to have discovered” (507).

All this is not to deny, however, that Hobbes solution has indeed produced a

remarkable “effective history”—one that with some justification (vide Kahn, Arendt,

Leo Strauss) may claim him as a key precursor of modern liberalism or (more

plausibly for me) as an intellectual founder of modern totalitarianism, as Arendt

had argued long ago. Like Alznauer, then, I quite agree that Hobbes’ dispensation

is still very much with us, perhaps more than ever. It would take us too far afield to

speculate on what that says about the state of contemporary societies whose

political leaders often seem obsessed with maximizing profits, government

surveillance, expanding global market shares, and control over natural resources,

thus appearing (especially in the United States) callously indifferent to the

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flourishing of the many but brazenly assisting the ever-expanding rapacity of the

few.

PART III – Whose Book? Whose Values? Negotiating Conflicting Interpretations

As is so often the case, Minding the Modern was not the book I intended to write.

Rather, it emerged from an attempt to lay the groundwork for the study of

Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of Bildung in literature and philosophy

that I had originally meant to write. The resulting book is above all an attempt to

develop a critical perspective on the narrative category of “modernity” – yet to do

so without preemptively committing to the terminology and procedures of

“critique,” that distinctly modern, a priori way of framing inquiry as the

emancipation from and definitive overcoming of the past. Put differently, the aim

was to avoid the logical fallacy of a critique that from the outset accepts modernity

as an all-encompassing reality whose local imperfections and temporary “crises”

supposedly can be adequately solved simply by doubling down on its reigning

assumptions and master-tropes: autonomy, secularity, progress, economic self-

fulfillment, individual claim rights, etc. Since these tropes ultimately all converge in

a particular model of subjectivity, I thought it helpful to scrutinize whether earlier

accounts of human agency, though always contested even in their own time, might

not only present us with different insights but also with very different styles of

(practical) reasoning. Minding the Modern thus interweaves three distinct strands of

inquiry: 1) the quest for viable accounts of human agency and human flourishing;

2) the shifting (and always contested) ratio between practical and speculative

reason; 3) and the reclamation of a hermeneutic strategies not preemptively

committed to an inherently suspicious and in tendency iconoclastic outlook on

intellectual traditions.

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Given these strategic objectives, it is particularly regrettable to find most, though

happily not all, responses to my book at this forum to have passed over in almost

complete silence the first seven Chapters of Minding the Modern. Whether that

silence reflects a tenacious prejudgment concerning the supposed irrelevance of all

things “pre-modern” or merely stems from flagging expertise is hard to tell. Yet as a

result of this non-engagement of my focused exegeses of Aristotle, the Stoics,

Augustine, Aquinas, and Ockham, valuable opportunities for productive

intellectual dialogue have been lost. Likewise, I would have welcomed at least

some methodological reflections on the conceptual architecture of Minding the

Modern – its critique of a detached historicism; its advocacy of hermeneutic

struggle; its methodological preference for modern phenomenology (and its distant

sources in Platonist thought); its commitment to a highly fluid and irresistibly

“current” understanding of intellectual traditions. Similarly, my strategic concern

not to explore some fundamental questions concerning modern agency solely on

the basis of a (potentially impoverished) conceptual inventory that has

predominated over the past four hundred years has been largely ignored.

Instead, some readers appear predisposed to measure my argument by the book

that they would have written or, in some particularly transparent cases (Vilallonga,

Kahn, and Pritchard) actually did write. In the case of Vilallonga, this tendency

takes such extreme form as to prevent him from engaging any of my specific

readings – of Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes,

Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, A. Smith, and Coleridge, to name but

the principal figures. The result is a polemical account of a book I did not write,

predicated on claims found in yet another book I also did not write, though, it

appears, Vilallonga just did. Under the circumstances, I thought it best to respond

to Vilallonga separately (see Addendum below).

Though more circumspect in her argument, Elizabeth Pritchard – author of Religion

in Public: Locke’s Political Theology (2013) and essays on Theodor Adorno – limits

19

her comments largely to what mention these two figures receive in my narrative. As

a result, readers unfamiliar with Minding the Modern will likely conclude from

Pritchard’s response that I, too, had written a book on Locke, albeit one with whose

conclusions, at least with regard to Locke, Pritchard finds herself very much at

variance. To Pritchard, and also to Coleman who wonders why I am not also

discussing Locke’s Essay, his Two Treatises on Government, I can only respond that

Locke here mainly serves to work out a transition into my discussion of Shaftesbury

and, again, that Minding the Modern does not purport to offer a continuous

historical narrative. Thus, in a book of nearly seven-hundred pages, barely ten

(317-27) are devoted to Locke’s epistemology of will and desire, and less than three

(309-11) to his account of toleration. One may, of course, demur at the relative

weighting of individual figures within the overall argument, but to do so risks

leaving the realm of argument for that of sheer preference. In the event, Pritchard

does not so much engage my reading of Locke but, rather, her own

misapprehension of it. In fact, I do not claim that Locke deliberately and

systematically “argu[es] for the privatization of religion” (Pritchard’s paraphrase).

Rather, I maintain that such a quarantining of belief was an entailment, quite

possibly unintended, of Locke’s insistence that “the care of each man’s soul, and

the things of heaven, which neither belong to the commonwealth, nor can be

subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self” (qtd. on 310).

My conclusion that, in the wake of Locke’s writings on toleration “religious life has

been quarantined from the realm of empirical, social practice” only signifies as part

of the “effective history” of Locke’s argument. It does not purport to tell us anything

about Locke’s political intentions, a matter in which Pritchard and I may even be in

agreement. Hence it won’t do for Pritchard to oppose my putative reading of Locke

simply by reiterating the thesis of her recent book, viz., “Locke did not advocate for

the privatization of religion … [but] for religion’s place in the public sphere.”

Rather more to the point would have been for her to show that passages such as the

small number I quote and discuss actually came to be read, in the decades and

20

centuries following, preponderantly along the lines that she now proposes. I rather

doubt that such a claim can be effectively sustained. Here again we see that a

conflict of interpretations cannot be resolved by merely (re)asserting one’s preferred

view of an author’s words and the intentions putatively underlying them, but only

by painstaking hermeneutic scrutiny of the effective history that the words in

question actually produced. Pritchard’s term of choice for that history is

“conventional readings,” which sounds rather more tendentious and dismissive

than Gadamer’s more considered notion of “effective history”

(Wirkungsgeschichte).

Where Pritchard and I do differ, however, is as to whether historically effective, so-

called “conventional readings” become irrelevant merely because the occasional

critic now unilaterally opposes them. From Hegel to Gadamer, philosophical

hermeneutics has wisely cautioned against confusing discrete (and potentially

capricious) acts of negation with the integrative work of understanding. Thus, while

it is true that Pritchard and I approach modern conceptions of human agency by

drawing on very different intellectual genealogies, our true differences stem less

from whom we read than how we read. For Pritchard, much stands to be gained

from “political, philosophical, feminist and womanist thinkers who have … made

good on the secular deregulation of religion and theology.” While this diversity of

our respective approaches strikes me as a good thing, her phrasing betrays a

notable impatience with intellectual traditions, which at times borders on their

wholesale and triumphalist dismissal. In her ominous wording, Minding the

Modern appears to pursue the “re-authorization of a particular Western intellectual

and theological canon.” This is indeed the case, just as it is true that Pritchard and I

“belong to different fandoms.” Yet all that seems incidental. Where Pritchard and I

truly part ways is on the question of whether a re-engagement of Western

intellectual traditions is an inherently objectionable undertaking and whether all

contemporary inquiry must fundamentally embrace the supersessionist narrative of

liberal-secular modernity that has predominated for the past half century. Pritchard

21

seems to imply as much, though she does not actually specify why one should take

that view but, instead, seems content to assume that her views on questions of

secularity and the canon reflect a majority opinion.

For my part, I confess to being unaware that a Western intellectual canon

comprising, inter alia, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Kant,

Newman, Husserl and many others besides has been de-authorized, as Pritchard so

nonchalantly implies. If this were so, it would help to know exactly when this

remarkable turn of events took place, and precisely whose authority and what

intellectual warrant had brought it about. Happily, there is ample evidence that

many canonical voices from Plato and Augustine forward continue to speak

eloquently and in delightfully unpredictable and poignant ways to our own

situation, however we may appraise it. Likewise, some of the most thoughtful and

creative intellectuals in our own time attest in their own, diverse ways to the

vibrancy of the canon with which Minding the Modern is also principally

concerned. I am thinking here of such disparate voices as John Milbank, Sarah

Coakley, Ephraim Radner, Jean-Luc Marion, Cecilia González-Andrieu, Gavin

Hyman, Marie-José Mondzain, and numerous younger scholars, all of whom would

likely be perplexed (or bemused) by Pritchard’s casual and sweeping references to

the “deregulation of religion and theology” and the supposed de-authorization of

the Western canon. Aside from ignoring the present abundance of lively, critical,

and diverse engagement with our literary, theological, and philosophical traditions,

such remarks only end up exposing a manifestly cramped and impoverished model

of humanistic inquiry as it prevails in some sectors of the contemporary academy.

An intellectual culture often consumed with drawing ideological lines and with

prevailing in a game of professional one-upsmanship inevitably sacrifices

hermeneutic labor and the dialectical engagement of rival interpretations to the

simpler pleasures of footnoted declarations.

22

My answer to some of Victoria Kahn’s critical points is largely identical to remarks I

first offered at a symposium on Minding the Modern organized by the Institute for

Advanced Study at Notre Dame University in April 2014. I see no reason to change

my comments now, mainly because in simply recycling her comments from that

symposium for the The Immanent Frame, Victoria Kahn made it clear that she was

not prima facie invested in dialogue and joint discovery. Such a manner of

proceeding sadly confirms my observation in Minding the Modern (50) that in the

liberal-secular academy “so-called pre-modern frameworks, conceptions, and ideas

[are] no longer engaged dialectically but unilaterally declared irrelevant or inimical

to the endeavor now at stake” (50). Kahn’s commentary illustrates the difference at

issue. Minding the Modern posits that our understanding of specific philosophical

and theological projects is bound up with our own distinctive place in the narrative

that they constitute. Given that we do not dwell outside that narrative but find our

own critical awareness to be at all times circumscribed by it, we are in no position

to render an ultimate verdict on its apparent direction. Even as Minding the Modern

offers a narrative of progressively deteriorating moral articulacy, it is neither a

straightforward “story of decline” as Kahn supposes me to have offered, nor does it

rest on some cartoonish assumption “that one should return to the era of Aquinas.”

I expressly reject the fiction of some humanistic “golden age” (MTM 15; s.a. 40),

and also demur at “the false choice between a nostalgic and an agnostically

‘objective’ stance” (MTM 69f.). Indeed, off-handed remarks such as that with the

rise of political economy in the eighteenth century “it’s all downhill” cast doubt on

how much of Minding the Modern Kahn actually read, considering that she only

engages Chapter 8 (on Hobbes).

Now, it is no accident that the shift in intellectual culture exemplified by Kahn’s

pronouncements had been pioneered by Hobbes, a writer strikingly disinclined to

tarry with competing views for any length of time (see Part II of my response).

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that there are at least two points on which Kahn

and I may be in partial agreement. First and at least in a strictly quantitative sense it

23

may well be true that “modernity is characterized by an intensification of

hermeneutic activity, including intense reflection on the criteria or norms of

judgment.” Indeed, even though Minding the Modern takes a sharply critical view

of the voluntarist and reductionist turn in writers like Hobbes, Locke, and

Mandeville, and of the cramped, at times proto-behaviorist view of mind

developed in Hume and A. Smith, their positions nonetheless did much to

stimulate the ambitious hermeneutic and genealogical projects of Hegel, Coleridge,

Newman, Nietzsche and a great deal of modern phenomenology from Brentano,

Husserl, Cassirer, and Gadamer all the way to Marion and Lacoste, to name but a

few. Particularly the phenomenological strand in modern thought, and the

revitalization of hermeneutics for which it cleared the ground, is of great intrinsic

value and truly indispensable to the arguments developed in Minding the Modern,

something repeatedly noted (MTM 30n; 60; 129; 282; 304).

Second, as regards the absence of Spinoza from my account, I readily concede that

his view of self-organizing reason would add an intriguing component to my

narrative. Yet Kahn’s remark that, on Spinoza’s account, “norms are not rooted in

“transcendent sources [but] emerge from within complex social and biological

systems” also reveals our fundamentally different perspectives on modern

conceptions of political and ethical reason. While I accept her characterization of

Spinoza’s view as such, I also reject the claim’s impersonal and monistic

underpinnings. For Kahn to make her argument workable, she would have had to

develop it as a counter-claim to mine, rather than simply assuming it to be true. As

matters stand, I regard her assertion to involve a category mistake in that it

conflates an ontological presupposition with historically contingent acts of

conceptualization. Thus, norms are not “products” or emanations of “complex

social and biological systems” as Kahn, in apparent embrace of Spinoza’s view,

contends. Rather, in their historically and materially shifting instantiation, social

and biological systems affect how we as “dependent rational animals” (to quote

Alasdair MacIntyre) grasp and participate in the reality of norms whose reality is

24

both antecedent and transcendent to our contingent appraisal of moral meanings.

Laws, rules, policies, or the countless social expectations and value judgments,

either publicly enacted or obliquely entertained – all these are “products” of time

and circumstance.

As I argue in Chapter 7 of Minding the Modern, this tendency of conflating the

logos with the construction of moral meanings by finite and impressionable human

agents operating in highly contingent circumstances is itself a deeply problematic

conceptual shift that gets underway in the early fourteenth century. It arises from

Ockham’s voluntaristic and often legalistic, overriding stress on divine

omnipotence (potentia absoluta), which renders philosophical and political

theology increasingly unable to distinguish between the idea of a just order and the

political, legal, and ethical procedures and obligations contingently adopted and

acknowledged for the sake of realizing and participating in that order. It would take

more of an argument that can be developed here to show how Spinoza (and

following him, Kahn herself) shares in that confusion and why, for that reason

alone, he may not offer an adequate conceptual resource for the just and equitable,

liberal-secular society that Kahn (in the face of much evidence to the contrary)

imagines herself to be inhabiting.

This last consideration takes me to the professio fidei with which Kahn concludes

her remarks: “I would rather live in this world of epistemological modesty and

tolerance than in [Pfau’s] world.” To credit our liberal-secular order with

“epistemological modesty” is peculiar enough for anyone even moderately alert to

the geo-political and ecological devastations wrought by three centuries worth of

accelerating, unbridled production and the rapacious consumption of resources

and goods – all undertaken for the sake of unrestrained socio-economic self-

fulfillment. These realities, rather than Polyannaish visions of “epistemological

modesty and tolerance,” will constitute modern Liberalism’s one enduring legacy.

Yet what truly makes me wince is the speculative self-portrait as a victim of

25

prejudice that Kahn proceeds to draw: “In my world, there is a place for people

who believe as Pfau does. In his world, there is no place at all for people like me.”

It would be sad indeed if this were the case; I am happy to assure her that this is

not so, even as I wonder whether Kahn has ever entertained the possibility that her

own views of modern political theology might cause some people (such as myself)

to feel left out. Be that as it may, in my intellectual world there is place for all kinds

of people, including those who, like Kahn herself, maintain a robust, and

sometimes even critical, allegiance to our liberal-secular modernity.

What secures that place, however, is neither high-minded “toleration,” justly

viewed with suspicion by Kant, nor an ethos of genteel indifference along the lines

of Matthew Arnold’s “doing as one likes” but, rather, genuine and vigorous

hermeneutic labor and “unceasing dialogue” (MTM 72). The foundation for the

kind of robust exchange that all of us are engaged in has to be the recognition of

our respective interlocutor’s intellectual and human reality and presence as a

person, as a “thou” rather than an impersonal “he” or “she” – a conceptual

tradition whose unfortunate eclipse by modernity’s third-person epistemologies is

traced in Part IV of Minding the Modern. Now, there have always been, and always

will be, prejudices informing our take on the world we inhabit. As Hans-Georg

Gadamer has argued, rightly I think, praejudicium in its true etymological sense

names less some willful bias than a rich texture of background assumptions

affording us practical orientation even as these also constrain our social

intelligence. Hence we have good reason to regard with suspicion any political and

social utopias claiming to have definitively overcome all prejudice. For, leaving

aside the monumental hubris of such a claim, a brief review of the French or the

Russian Revolution will remind us how easily self-styled progressive thinkers have

elected to repress dissenting views simply by charging their authors with general

intolerance. Something analogous seems to animate Kahn’s casual reference to

unspecified prejudices supposedly fueling my overall argument in Minding the

26

Modern, merely because she does not find her own views and preferences reflected

in it.

It seems appropriate, then, for me to conclude with a brief reflection on the status

of pluralism in our intellectual and political culture. Are we to think of it as an end

in itself? Is an abstract conception of “diversity” truly the highest good to be

affirmed by our reasoning processes? If so, it may well be most effectively secured

if we were to refrain from engaging one another at all. For my part, I doubt that

diversity and pluralism can deliver what they promise as long as they remain purely

notional and abstract. With good reason, Coleridge’s analysis of the I/Thou

dialectic as the fulcrum of ethical reflection has him conclude that to grasp the

unconditional reality of the person across from us, we must “negate the sameness

in order to establish the equality.” In that spirit, then, I posit that pluralism in

intellectual and social life alike constitutes a good precisely insofar as it enhances

our concrete and undesigning relatedness as persons capable of many things,

including practical reasoning, care, love, and countless other shared practices and

activities. None of these are ever fully achieved in isolation from, let alone in

relentless competition (economic, political, intellectual) with, other human beings.

Otherwise, the idea of pluralism will serve merely as an ideological fig leaf for an

unfettered libido dominandi in all realms of human endeavor.

Taken as a rational good, then, pluralism logically presupposes, indeed is only

legitimated by, our joint quest for articulating shared goods and commitments. Our

intellectual and spiritual flourishing as individuals cannot be ensured by categorical

affirmations of the self’s radical singularity, autonomy, and a narcissistic fixation on

differences that supposedly set it apart from all other selves. Rather, we flourish as

minds and as human beings inasmuch as we are in dialogue with and

“interanimated” by one another (to recall John Donne’s happy phrase). That such

dialogue will cause substantive differences to emerge and to be fully articulated is

both just and right. Yet for such differences to signify, we must resist the temptation

27

of fetishizing them as tokens of some abstract notion of diversity or to seize upon

them for purposes of identity politics or a hyper-compartmentalized

professionalism. Conversely, autocratically to repress such differences merely for

the sake of conceptual tidiness or totalitarian control also constitutes an ethical and

intellectual lapse. In either case, what weakens the hyper-professionalized,

competitive, and proprietary model prevailing today is its axiomatic embrace of a

third-person conception of knowledge.

An archeology of a relational model of personhood and knowledge, such as

Minding the Modern traces it (535-618) in the writings of Richard of St. Victor,

Coleridge, Buber, and Levinas offers a viable alternative here. For only in the

encounter with a concrete Thou distinguished by its own distinctive and irreducible

presence and reality in feeling, thinking, and speech will modern Liberalism’s

worrisomely formulaic and abstract appeal to pluralism and diversity truly be put to

the test. At its very root, all human speech (and writing) is an ethical, not an

epistemological act, no matter how complex its propositional content may turn out

to be. Without the antecedent reality of an addressee there can be no message.

Hence it is not diffidence, detachment, or studied prevarication that animates us

but Platonic, undesigning “wonder” at the sheer presence and givenness of what

and, most importantly, who is before us. Yet precisely this fundamental awareness

appears to elude much academic discourse today. For the culture of intellectual

debate prevailing today, as evidenced by this forum, often appears unhelpfully

preoccupied with cordoning off intellectual terrain and with prevailing in an arena

of an arid, solipsistic, and competitive professionalism. No doubt, Minding the

Modern at times exhibits these shortcomings, too, even as its closing chapters

attempt to trace and affirm the value of a long-standing, relational (I-Thou) model

of personhood that shows human inquiry in its highest form to be a participatory

and joint endeavor.

Durham, NC

28

December 2014

Addendum: Response to Borja Vilallonga’s comments on Minding the Modern

Minding the Modern traces a deep and complex intellectual genealogy of the often

tangled and decidedly uneven ways in which Western intellectual traditions

(pagan, Christian, secular) have struggled to conceptualize human agency (Parts II

and III). Particular attention is given to how, over the course of the last four

hundred years or so, conceptions of human agency have lost much of their richness

and perspicacity, especially subsidiary concepts such as will, judgment, and person

– Basisphänomene (to borrow Ernst Cassirer’s term of art) that, I maintain, are truly

indispensable for meaningful humanistic inquiry. So as to avoid over-

generalizations or turn into a jeremiad of sorts, Minding the Modern has been

framed as a series of detailed and considered interpretations of canonical texts

ranging from Aristotle and the Stoics, through Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes,

Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and ending with a

comprehensive reading of Coleridge’s later philosophical and theological writings.

Additionally, the book features some shorter interpretive forays into Ockham and

Locke, as well as Blake, Nietzsche, and several other Enlightenment and post-

Enlightenment thinkers.

In the 1,745 words that comprise his “response” to Minding the Modern, Vilallonga

does not once engage or contest my various accounts of any of these figures.

Neither does he pay attention to (or, perhaps, summon the requisite intellectual

generosity and acumen) to identify my book's conceptual architecture. He thus fails

the most elementary standards of what it means to offer a critical and considered

response to intellectual work done by someone else. For to do so one must begin

29

by restating the book's objectives, identifying and appraising its methodological

procedures, its organization, and its various claims. Only when these steps have

been taken in clear and dispassionate form may one proceed to articulate whether

the book succeeds or, if not, how it may be said to fail on its own terms, rather than

those that the reviewer happens to have espoused. Vilallonga’s “response” satisfies

none of the basic professional norms. What he offers instead is a detailed account

of his own forthcoming book, including a roll call (indeed, almost a complete

bibliography) of nineteenth-century theologians evidently engaged therein.

Strangely, he also seems upset that it was not me who wrote that book.

Now, I won’t dwell on the editorial wisdom of publishing what, in effect, amounts

to a non-response. Neither can I express regret for not having written a book more

along the lines that Vilallonga has adopted, even as I find his eager advocacy of his

own, forthcoming first monograph both understandable and charming. All that

remains, then, is the to correct at least some of Vilallonga’s more flagrant

mischaracterizations and distortions of Minding the Modern. Admittedly, in

tackling this Augean labor, all I can hope for is to restore the intellectual balance

needed by any reasonably fair-minded and attentive reader as she navigates my

book’s various conceptual strands and scrutinizes its many interpretive moves and

claims.

Vilallonga’s main contention appears to be that Minding the Modern has willfully

constructed a Catholic intellectual trajectory, one of which he evidently does not

approve. Given how persistently this rather quizzical assertion is entwined with the

narrative arc of Vilallonga’s own forthcoming book, it appears that competitive

eagerness has temporarily trumped his intellectual discernment here. For my

“purported genealogy” or catena aurea (to invoke Vilallonga’s preferred conceit) is,

as other readers have noted, far more complex and expansive than Vilallonga

makes it out to be. Thus Minding the Modern does not begin with Aquinas, as

readers having only Vilallonga’s “response” to go by might well suppose. Rather,

30

and with good reason, my narrative unfolds a detailed account of how the concepts

of Will and Person gradually came to crystallize in the course of an often tangled

migration of Platonist, Aristotelian, and Stoic thought into Patristic theology and

into the writings of Augustine and Aquinas in particular.

Since these and many other voices engaged in my book fall well outside the

nineteenth century, Vilallonga’s presumptive area of expertise, many of his

objections to Minding the Modern pivot on his having effectively ignored the first

four-hundred pages of the narrative unfolded in my book. Indeed, one suspects he

may only have skimmed these parts, for how else could he claim that my account

“jumps” from Aquinas to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman. This

is all the more regrettable as my introduction makes clear – and the mid-section of

my book, ranging from Locke and Shaftesbury to Adam Smith, puts paid to it – that

engaging dissenting voices is an integral component of all rational inquiry (69-70).

Indeed, the first three chapters – whose conceptual intent and architecture

Vilallonga also fails to address in any shape or form – make clear that Minding the

Modern does not purport to offer an inclusive, let alone seamless history. Rather, it

seeks to inquire into what I posit is a progressive loss of conceptual acuity and rich

intellectual texture where our understanding of human agency is concerned. That I

locate some of the origins for this troubling development in Ockham’s version of

Scholasticism should also put to rest Vilallonga’s breezy supposition that Minding

the Modern is itself some unreflective exercise in neo-Scholastic apologetics.

Readers more open to intellectual discovery – and less eager to strap Minding the

Modern onto the Procrustean bed of their own, more circumscribed concerns – will

have little reason to misconstrue Minding the Modern as a history of the Catholic

intellectual tradition. It is one thing to draw on some prominent representatives of

that tradition, as my book happily does, and quite another to purport to reconstruct

or reenact all its claims. That Vilallonga should have supposed the latter to be my

book’s intent makes one suspect that in writing his “response” he was rather too

31

preoccupied with his own argument and, hence, vexed to discover that other

intellectuals might chose to address different topics in different ways. In fact,

Minding the Modern does not fall within the province of panoramic historiography

in which, it would seem, Vilallonga is more at ease than in the domain of pre-

modern and modern philosophy and theology. Above all, Minding the Modern

amounts to a sustained hermeneutic engagement of some voices central to the

Western theological, philosophical and (to a lesser extent) literary tradition so as to

document how, over the course of some 2,500 years the concept of the Human has

been framed in strikingly different ways. That I take a rather dim view of

reductionist and mechanist accounts of human agency and their long-term costs

and consequences is, of course, true. Yet this appraisal is not front-loaded into the

narrative but successively worked out through sustained hermeneutic engagement

of canonical positions on human personhood, willing, and judgment.

Take for an example, the trope of modernity as “shipwreck,” which Vilallonga

evidently regards as overblown and which he assumes other readers will also

inevitably repudiate. Yet that trope and some of the others cited by Vilallonga is not

of my own devising but, instead, originates in Coleridge’s oeuvre. Decidedly aware

(as Vilallonga unfortunately is not) of the extensive literary and philosophical uses

to which the trope nautical misadventure has been put, Coleridge’s Rime develops

it in brilliant imaginative detail as an allegory of the modern individual – voluntarist

in its epistemological bearing, disaffected from any moral community, and

manifestly bereft of any teleological concept of reason. Here and elsewhere in my

book, I do not impose such metaphors but, on the contrary, distil tropes and

concepts critical of modernity from a wide range of voices, rather few of which

turn out to be Catholic. Contrary to Vilallonga’s own habits of argument (at least to

judge by his response to my book), the story unfolded on the pages of Minding the

Modern is the fruit of dedicated hermeneutic labor, not willful assertion.

32

For reasons of economy, then, my book (already very long) has had to bypass a

number of seminal thinkers, including, much to my regret, Luther and Kant, whose

reflections on the human will and person would inevitably have caused some of

my arguments to assume a somewhat different shape. Yet these and other

omissions are expressly acknowledged and explained (75); and nowhere do I claim

to have assembled an exclusive, let alone exhaustive cast of characters. Anything

else would have resulted in mere string of names and cross-references, a practice

with which I may be less comfortable than, to judge by his “response,” Vilallonga

appears to be, mentioning as he does more than two dozen names of modern

Catholic theologians, many of whom could hardly be said to be relevant to a book

whose historical narrative winds up around 1830. Beginning with Aristotle and

ending with Coleridge, it seems rather whimsical to construe Minding the Modern

as a (failed) narrative about nineteenth-century Catholicism. Fascinating though

they are in their own right, many of the figures whose absence Vilallonga so

vociferously laments (e.g., Dupanloup, Montalambert, Guéranger, Rahner) are at

most peripheral to my book’s conceptual intent and historical scope.

More importantly, in my Prolegomena (65) I am quite forthright about the fact that

Minding the Modern means to proceed selectively; and surely not all intellectual

histories have to take on the cast of a phone directory. Cumulatively, the figures

that I engage as representative of the course of Western intellectual thought on

questions of human agency (Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville,

Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Coleridge, et al.) obviously do not constitute some

distinctly Catholic genealogy. Minding the Modern homes in on a necessarily

restricted cast of characters so as to tease out tensions and contradictions intrinsic

to their conceptions of human agency. Such an approach reveals how

philosophical and theological (not historical) arguments – our own no less than

those developed by the writers to whose works we return – are comprised of

countless local acts of hermeneutic scrutiny and reasoned judgment. Such

unwavering hermeneutic engagement with our intellectual precursors strikes me as

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an open and honest way of proceeding in that it furnishes one’s readers with a

genuine forum of intellectual discovery with which they may agree or, in informed

and hermeneutically responsible ways, disagree.

Given the patient exegetical approach cultivated throughout Minding the Modern,

it is all the more disappointing that Vilallonga not even once summons the

exegetical patience and intellectual resources needed to contest a specific reading

in a book comprised of so much detailed interpretive work. The only place in his

“response” where he seems to betray a fleeting inclination to that effect concerns

his misgivings about the way that I establish a convergence between the I/Thou

dialectic that Coleridge develops in his late writings and strikingly similar

arguments subsequently advanced by Buber and Levinas. To suggest that in

pointing out such conceptual affinities I “dare to Christianize Martin Buber’s I and

Thou” (emphasis mine) is either the fruit of stunning imperceptiveness or outright

professional malice. In this particular context as throughout my book, I am

following where the textual evidence and good-faith hermeneutic efforts lead me. It

is altogether gratuitous and professionally dishonest for Vilallonga to claim that in

tracing concurrent lines of thought “Jewish tradition, thought, and mysticism are

reduced … to a mere Christian complement.” In fact, nearly the obverse scenario is

true, as Coleridge himself acknowledges when pointedly crediting the Jewish

scholar Hyman Hurwitz (in a letter quoted on 594n) with having articulated a

much richer conception of the foundations of human personhood “than many

called Christians.” It is hard to find an critic show more blatant disregard for the

“sound, non-sectarian, objective scholarship” that he himself urges toward the end

of his statement than Vilallonga in his misrepresentation of my argument here, and

in his imputation of some underhanded, narrow ideological scheme supposedly

animating Minding the Modern.

Here as throughout his response, Vilallonga’s claims seem anchored in rather

fanciful inferences about beliefs that I supposedly hold, don’t hold, or should hold

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– rather than attentively considering what Minding the Modern does: viz., to loosen

our often complacent idea of the modern as the supposedly definitive

emancipation from and overcoming of our distant intellectual and conceptual

sources. To make the latter case, I maintain (65), requires a reengagement of

canonical philosophical and literary texts, not as fossilized material but as

enduringly relevant to our own intellectual situation. Vilallonga and others may, of

course, disagree with this approach, but to do so they would have to show that the

kind of careful and scrupulous reading of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas,

Shaftesbury, Hume, and others undertaken in my book fails to grasp their

conceptual intent; that these writers cannot be read in this way. Unfortunately,

Vilallonga seems to have only the dimmest conception of the intellectual

responsibilities that one incurs as a “respondent” to someone else’s work.

Speculating about an author’s intellectual and religious positions is not part of that

task. Dorothy Sayers puts the matter rather well: “what the writer believes or does

not believe is of little importance one way or the other. What is of great and

disastrous importance is the proved inability of supposedly educated persons to

read.”

Ultimately, this unhappy situation points to another, more substantive question:

namely, what exactly Vilallonga takes to be the defining criteria of a “scholarly

book.” It appears that where scholarship serves an argument whose intellectual

scope and conceptual architecture variously trouble or elude Vilallonga he will, as

it were by default, deny a book the imprimatur of “sound, objective, non-sectarian”

scholarship and, ultimately, declare it to fall outside the bounds of “Reason” itself.

This idea of a noumenal Reason – non-partisan, self-evident, transparent,

procedural, and wholly man-made, and to be conveyed in affectless, detached, and

impartial scholarly prose – is itself one of modern Liberalism’s most enduring and

questionable fictions. Clearly, one need not be an Anglican, a Thomist, or an

Augustinian to question this ideal. Indeed, in stating, as I do frankly and early on,

“that reasoned inquiry not only does not preclude an inner commitment but, in

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fact, positively demands it” (70) I do not take myself to be speaking from any

particular intellectual or confessional standpoint. Moreover, as Fr. Thomas Joseph

White notes in his response, Minding the Modern also draws on a rather diverse

array of thinkers often severely critical of modern Liberalism (e.g. Nietzsche,

Tocqueville, Taine, Dostoevsky, T. Mann), many of whom developed their critique

of secular liberalism from altogether disparate and often robustly secular

perspectives. It is finally Vilallonga’s complacent view of modern Liberalism and

procedural rationality as having secured, seemingly once and for all, a monopoly

on the logos that accounts for his strangely willfully illiberal misconstrual of my

book. Perhaps, with enough time and reflection, he will discover Reason to be

something of much wider compass than the rather cramped and self-regarding

legacy of Enlightenment rationalism and nineteenth-century historicism that so

palpably constrains much of his thinking.

Durham, NC October 2014