Modernity and Jewishness

Within the modern West we have learnt to think of the Enlightenment as a secular project which claims to think of individuals as rational selves. Where faith was positioned within pre-modern societies which were organised around tradition, we learnt within an Enlightenment vision of modernity to find reason. People were no longer expected to accept beliefs as a matter of faith but could confidently expect to have to prove their beliefs according to reason. This helped radically to redefine the relationship between public and private spheres and religious belief became a matter of individual choice alone. So it was that social theories tended to be framed in the terms of a secular rationalism. This made it difficult, however, to recognise the extent to which modernity had been shaped as a secularised form of a dominant Christian tradition, so that the philosophical traditions of modernity encoded in their very categories secularised Christian notions.

The Kantian tradition in ethics has had enormous impact in shaping the traditions of social theory which have flowed from Durkheim and Weber. In their different ways they have learnt to accept an identification between morality and an independent faculty of reason. Reason was deemed to be radically separated from nature, as the intelligible realm was for Kant split from the empirical. It was through reason that we were to discern the dictates of the moral law and it was as rational selves that we were to be subject to its demands. This promised a universalism within moral theory which was to leave its marks on the dominant frameworks of social theory within modernity. It made it as difficult to identify the disdain for nature which was encoded within the dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as it was to illuminate the disdain for the body and sexuality which came to be identified with the ‘sins of the flesh’. These concerns were to be radically excluded from the frameworks of classical social theory for they threatened a rationalism that was constructed around a fierce distinction between reason and nature.

As we learn to discern the dictates of the moral law with Kant, so we learn to ‘rise above’ our ‘animal’ natures.