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THE PARADOX OF MODERNITY: CURRENT DEBATES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2015
Extract
Talk of modernity is plagued with paradox. A relativist stance towards modernity—the claim, for example, that modernity is just one cultural configuration among others—seems to contradict itself. The concept of “cultural configuration,” and similar notions (such as “language game,” “discourse,” “community,” or “myth”), are themselves the products of modern intellectual research and debate. If the relativist claim is true, it appears to undermine the validity of those very conditions of modern intellectual debate that make the claim thinkable. But to argue for modernity's superiority over other cultural configurations seems equally problematic. If the criteria of superiority are themselves modern, then the argument appears question-begging. But if the criteria are not modern, then these non-modern criteria (by which the superiority of the modern can be discerned) would appear themselves to be superior to modern criteria.
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Footnotes
*
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Ve Rencontre EMMA, Histoire intellectuelle des émotions, de l’antiquité à nos jours, in Paris, May 2013; to the Center for the Humanities, Washington University in Saint Louis, in March 2014; to the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of French History, in Durham, England, in July 2014; and to the Department of History of the University at Buffalo, New York, in September 2014. I am grateful to the participants in these sessions for their useful comments, as well as to the editors of Modern Intellectual History for their careful evaluation of an earlier draft. I would also like to thank the participants in my graduate seminar entitled “What Is Modernity?” at Duke University in fall semester, 2013.
References
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10 Ibid., x.
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12 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 3, emphasis added; on new cultural history and postmodernism see ibid., 17–23.
13 Ibid., 11, 52.
14 Ibid., e.g., 37, 58, 68.
15 Ibid., 49.
16 Ibid., 267–8.
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21 Ibid., 486; Spinoza is discussed at length at 473–93.
22 Ibid., 486–7.
23 Ibid., 505.
24 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 13, original emphasis.
25 Ibid., 61, original emphases.
26 Ibid., 35–6, 220.
27 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 43.
28 And this is a task, Chakrabarty adds, which is “impossible within the knowledge protocols of academic history.” Ibid., 46.
29 Ibid., 93, emphasis added.
30 Ibid., 103–4.
31 Ibid., 94.
32 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 115.
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51 Ibid., 43.
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72 Ibid., 115.
73 Ibid., 122.
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76 Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, 167. In the original, Anderson refers to the “four” types of validity claim laid out by Habermas; see note 74 above.
77 Thomas-Fogiel, Death of Philosophy, 118–21.
78 This point is obvious from, for example, the long quote of Habermas that Anderson provides in The Way We Argue Now, 168, from Moral Consciousness, p. 137.
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81 Searle and Vanderveken's alternative proposal—that there are seven types of validity claim implicit in every speech act—suffers from a similar importation of a modern world view; see Searle, John R. and Vanderveken, Daniel, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.
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95 Quoted in Meyer, Bossuet, 124, emphasis added: “car il s’élève souvent dans les coeurs certaines imitations des sentiments véritables par lesquels un homme se trompe lui-même; si bien qu’il ne faut pas croire en certains ferveurs, ni quelques désirs imparfaits.”
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99 E.g. CP, 398, 399, 438. Bayle's thinking obviously relied in part on the growing body of critical and historical scholarship on the Bible that was appearing in his time, especially Richard Simon's Histoire critique de Vieux Testament (1678). See Popkin, Richard, The History of Skepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 225–9Google Scholar; Woodbridge, John D., “La ‘grande chasse aux manuscrits’: La controverse eucharistique et Richard Simon,” in Elyada, Ouzi and Le Brun, Jacques, eds., Conflits politiques, controverses religieuses: Essais d’histoire européenne aux 16e–18e siècles (Paris, 2002), 143–75Google Scholar; Whelan, Anatomy of Superstition, 146–58.
100 CP, 427–30. These examples are also discussed in Pierre Bayle, Nouvelles lettres de l’auteur de la Critique générale de l’Histoire du Calvinisme, Letter IX, in Bayle, Oeuvres diverses, 2: 221–5.
101 These passages are discussed (but without reference to speech act theory) in Kilcullen, John, Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld, Bayle, and Toleration (Oxford, 1988), 62–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 CP, 439: “Il n’est pas nécessaire que j’avertisse mon Lecteur que je n’exclus pas la grace de l’acte qui nous fait adhérez aux véritez revélées. Je veux bien que ce soit elle qui nous fasse sentir que tel ou tel sens de l’Ecriture est véritable, & qui nous modifie de telle maniere que précisément le sens qui est vrai nous paroisse vrai. Mais je dis que la grace qui produit ce sentiment, ne fait pas pour cela que nous connoissions aucune preuve certaine & omni exceptione majore [i.e. without contradiction] du sens que nous croïons vrai.”
103 Ibid., 439: “nous demeurons convaincus que c’est pourtant une vérité révelée. Ce sera un effet de la grace, tant que l’on voudra; à Dieu ne plaise que je le conteste.” But an interior sentiment, a conviction of conscience, is also a “marque qui se trouve dans les hommes les plus hérétiques.”
104 Ibid., 408–10.
105 Ibid., 372–3. The idea that miracles were not as common as in earlier times, widely accepted by Protestants, acquired additional force in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. Bayle, like Locke and others, subscribed to this view. See Lagrée, La raison ardente, 67–80; Meyer, Bossuet, 159; Cabanel, Histoire des protestants en France, 641; Mooney, T. Brian and Imbrosciano, Anthony, “The Curious Case of Mr. Locke's Miracles,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 57/3 (2005), 147–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan, Todd, “Bayle's Critique of Lockean Superaddition,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 36/4 (2006), 511–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ayers, M. R., “Mechanism, Superaddition, and the Proof of God's Existence in Locke's Essay,” Philosophical Review, 90/2 (1981), 210–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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109 Pierre Bayle, Addition aux pensées diverses, in Bayle, Oeuvres diverses, 3: 178, quoted in Whelan, Anatomy of Superstition, 67: “Ils se contentent de persuader par l’entremise des passions; ils vont droit au coeur, & non pas droit à l’entendement; ils tâchent d’exciter l’amour, la haine, la colere.”
110 Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Huddersfield, 1796), 22–3Google Scholar.
111 CP, 415.
112 E.g. ibid., 440.
113 Quoted in Bost, Pierre Bayle, 254.
114 CP, 444: “affreuse et lamentable désolation.”
115 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 94.
116 This discussion of the Bayle–Jurieu dispute follows Bost, Pierre Bayle, 301–85.
117 Quoted in Bost, Pierre Bayle, 341: “en avérant, par des signes non équivoques, que Dieu lui a tellement conféré le don de prophétie qu’il voit dans le coeur des gens tout ce qui s’y passe. S’il ne fait pas plus de miracles que Moïse, on ne le croira pas sur sa parole douée de cette prérogative, s’étant trompé si souvent.”
118 The phrase is from Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1987)Google Scholar.
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125 See Martin, John's discussion of the “porosity” of early modern souls in his Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Houndmills, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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127 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling.