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In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.
A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.
“The sheer depth of Pfau’s scholarship must deter criticism. His philosophical claims are underwritten by his dazzling erudite close readings, and he traverses with ease a vast intellectual terrain. . . . The case that Pfau makes is compelling, and its urgency . . . is hardly over-stated.” —European Romantic Review
Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840.
List of Abbreviations
Exordium: Modernity’s Gaze
Part I. Prolegomena
1. Frameworks or Tools? On the Status of Concepts in Humanistic Inquiry
2. Forgetting by Remembering: Historicism and the Limits of Modern Knowledge
3. “A large mental field”: Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge after Newman
Part II. Rational Appetite: An Emergent Conceptual Tradition
4. Beginnings: Desire, Judgment, and Action in Aristotle and the Stoics
5. Consolidation: St. Augustine on Choice, Sin, and the Divided Will
6. Rational Appetite and Good Sense: Will and Intellect in Aquinas
7. Rational Claims, Irrational Consequences: Ockham Disaggregates Will and Reason
Part III. Progressive Amnesia: Will and Crisis of Reason
8. Impoverished Modernity: Will, Action, and Person in Hobbes’s Leviathan
9. The Path toward Non-Cognitivism: Locke’s Desire and Shaftesbury’s Sentiment
10. From Naturalism to Reductionism: Mandeville’s Passion and Hutcheson’s Moral Sense
11. Mindless Desires and Contentless Minds: Hume’s Enigma of Reason
12. Virtue without Agency: Sentiment, Behavior, and Habituation in A. Smith
13. After Sentimentalism: Liberalism and the Discontents of Modern Autonomy
Part IV. Retrieving the Human: Coleridge on Will, Person, and Conscience
14. Good or Commodity? Modern Knowledge and the Loss of Eudaimonia
15. The Persistence of Gnosis: Freedom and “Error” in Philosophical Modernity
16. Beyond Voluntarism and Deontology: Coleridge’s Notion of the Responsible Will
17. Existence before Substance: The Idea of “Person” in Humanistic Inquiry
18. Existence as Reality and Act: Person, Relationality, and Incommunicability
19. “Consciousness has the appearance of another”: On Relationality as Love
20. “Faith is fidelity . . . to the conscience”: Coleridge’s Ontology
Works Cited 619
Index