Introduction 1
PART I: FROM COSMOS TO NATURE
PART II: FROM MICROCOSMOS TO SUBJECT
PART III: FROM DEIFIED NATURE TO SUPERNATURAL GRACE
Notes 255
Index 287
Giordano Bruno (60-63)
Bruno led toward modernism by rejecting the idea of creation altogether. He reintroduced the world soul. This Neoplatonic concept allowed him to propagate Copernicus's heliocentric world system in a way that Copernicus himself did not. The traditional view was that in a world-centered created universe everything had a naturally assigned place (by God). "Bruno perceived that once the earth had been removed from its central position, any ground for considering the universe centered at all disappeared." (61) And he understood that "once we abandon the ancient idea of a circular motion of the heavens [in a finite universe], the need for considering the cosmos finite disappears." (61) Bruno perceived, with Cusanus, that "if the universe is infinite, then...the idea of a fixed center had itself become meaningless." (61) In the infinite universe that Bruno imagined, then, "the world soul would guarantee the order and coherence that the theory of the locus naturalis had once secured in a centered cosmos. It was Bruno, then, not Copernicus, who first envisioned a totally open cosmology." (61)
This led Bruno to his particular conception of God. If the universe was infinite--and it now was deemed to be by Bruno--then God had to be totally revealed and expressed. "To withhold any possible manifestation would be 'invidious' on God's part and hence incompatible with divine perfection. Precisely because his expression is total and necessary, God is as entirely immanent in the UNFOLDED [my emphasis] being of the universe as he is in himself." (62) God "actualizes all his possibilities in cosmic self-expression." (62) "The world is grounded in God's essence, not in his will." (62) That is, he is not a Prime Mover standing apart from his creation. HOWEVER, this is not a pantheistic view, because Bruno's God "transcends the manifold universe." (62) The infinity of the universe does not coincide with God's infinity, "even though both of them are divine." (62)
"God unfolds himself in the universe, and yet the unfolding continues to differ from his enfolded nature. Through the world soul [my emphasis] God mediates his transcendent unity with the endless multiplicity of the cosmos." (62) [[Is the world soul then God's tool for unfolding himself?]] The world soul, said Bruno, is "the form of all things." (62)
God is thus immanent in nature as a first principle rather than as a First Cause as in Aquinas. This gives matter a divine status. "Matter then ultimately coincides with nature as principle of generation." (63) "This creative function of matter was, surprisingly, made possible by the Christian dogma that God had directly created matter as well as form, while in Greek thought matter owed its reality entirely to form." (63)
Spinoza followed Bruno's thought, which Dupre' calls "noncreationist panentheism." (63) [[panentheism: the doctrine that God includes the world as a part though not the whole of his being. pantheism,, by contrast, is the doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God: there is no God but the combined forces and laws manifested in the existing universe. Webster's Unabridged]]
Dupre' recounts that Bruno's redivinized nature was overshadowed by the purely mechanistic theory of Descartes and Newton. But once the divinely started clockwork world was accepted as self-supporting and self-moving, "nature attained a transcendence of its own." (64) That opened the way for Diderot and other French materialists, influenced by Spinoza, to take support from Bruno's old thought. (64) [[What comes around goes around?]]
In this part, Dupre' goes back to classical culture to locate the human individual "subject" in the divinely grounded cosmos: the single "self" was thought to be a microcosm of the whole. Early humanists revived the notion that the "the person bears a unique responsibility for maintaining and furthering [the cosmos's] order." (p. 97) However, the cosmos was converting into the object, "nature," separate from the self. The self or subject became an observer of the object of nature: it became "a mere function of the objectifying process." (p. 93)
"Self-expression" thus became important, but the original reason for its importance (i.e., the person is a microcosm) declined as people came to think of the cosmos as objective nature. The more they thought that way about nature, the more they thought about themselves as subjects apart from a divinely integrated cosmos. In this new modern frame of mind, early humanists felt the burden of having to express in words the meaning of human existence. Meaning no longer was a given that accompanied existence. "When meaning is no longer given with existence, existence itself becomes a quest for meaning." (p. 101)
In his section titled "The Self as a Subject" (pp. 112-119), Dupre' lays out a critically important story of the way the modern self "came to envision its role within the total order of being." (p.112) The story involves a "strange reversal" in the meaning of "subject." It originally meant "what lies under", the most elementary level of being. John Duns Scotus, however, induced a turn. He "attributed a distinct mental reality to the known." That is, things known in the mind acquired an "objective" being; because they were in the mind, they were "ideal." The subject,whose mind contained the ideal objects, came to be thought of as "real." Dupre explains the turn as follows:
Once this mental subject [ie, the human mind] came to be regarded as the source of the ideal qualities previously considered inherent in all other supposita, it bound them to itself as objects, that is, as being for-the-subject. It thereby took on the Promethean task of reconstructing the entire order of reality in ideal terms. Paradoxically, in the process of doing so the self increasingly lost its own substantial content to the all-absorbing cognitive and volitive functions it exercised. (p.112)
This powerful passage seems to us to echo with the dominant strains of existential alienation of modernist enactment. It reached its climax in the 1960s. After the "absurdist" cry of the post-WWII person in a universe that did not answer, the Western mind began to speak more directly of the limits of meaning. Now we label that the turn to postmodernity.
Dupre' builds on this insight to show how the doubt at the heart of this modern reconfiguration of "subject" and "objective" nature drove Descartes, the pole around whom our very understanding of modernity revolves. Dupre' holds that Descartes strove to "restore the foundations of human knowledge by converting moral uncertainty into philosophical doubt and doubt itself into a method for attaining certainty." (p.115)
In this observation, it seems to us that Dupre takes us into the very core of what the modern scientific project signifies for us AS PHILOSOPHY. The reductionist method of induction, in its intentions, is not a dry process that squeezes the heart out of the human condition. It is, by this reading, a method for making--better yet, remaking--sense of the world-become-object.
Dupre' ends this block-buster section with a final observation on the modern "self" that requires our careful attention if we want to understand the dilemma of the modern self-subject. In his interpretation, Descartes identified "self" with "mental substance," which was the opposite of "bodily substance." But Descartes did not specify what "mental substance" contained. So, "This disconcerting emptiness of the foundational self announces its primarily functional future in modern thought." That function was purely to be the "source of meaning and value." (p. 118) The self's function came to be to make itself through self-expression, and also the world and God. We quote Dupre' to catch the fullness of meaning here:
In becoming pure project, the modern self has become severed from those sources [ie, in a divinized nature] that once provided its content....The metaphysics of the ego isolates the self. It narrows selfhood to individual solitude and reduces the other to the status of object. (p. 119)
(Dupre gives historical depth to the PROGRAMME's Commandment III of postmodernism--that thou shalt not bow down thyself to the liberal humanist image of the autonomous self.
PART III: FROM DEIFIED NATURE TO SUPERNATURAL GRACE
[[[in process]]
Anyone defining and assessing postmodernism cannot escape searching for an understanding of modernism. For, to a considerable degree, postmodernism matters because of its critical analysis of modernist ideas and sensibilities.
Dupre' contributes a critically important tool to the kit of anyone searching for that understanding of modernism.
Many writers tell us that the essentials of modernism, which are critically addressed by postmodernists, come together in the 18th century Enlightenment project. For them it conveniently sums up the entire range of modernist themes. The clarity of its tenets and high profile of its writers and thinkers make the Enlightenment a large (and vulnerable) target for postmodernist critique. Here and there throughout the PROGRAMME itself, one finds the Enlightenment in the cross hairs. Postmodernist critics find in the Enlightenment the totalizing fallacies of universal Reason. In the Enlightenment's commitment to objective reality, they see the infamous "mirror of nature" that offends postmodernist understanding.
This shorthand use of the Enlightenment to represent all of modernism poses important critical limitations. (The PROGRAMME includes an insightful exposition on those limitations in a review essay by Robert Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth)
Dupre' attempts to situate the rise of modernism at a much earlier historical time. In doing so, he gives us an exegesis that plumbs more deeply the changes wrought in classical and medieval antecedents by the earliest moderns. He represents these changes in three broad areas of Western thought. In one of the changes, people abandoned the sense of an integrated cosmos and began to see nature as an object apart from themselves. In the second change, people abandoned their sense of themselves as microcosms of a universal order and began to think of themselves as separate subjects. In the third change, people abandoned their belief that nature was deified and began to think that supernatural grace functioned apart from objective nature.
These momentous changes, in Dupre's hermeneutics (as he calls his essay), started in the period from the late 1300s to the end of the 1400s. It was this "more primitive cultural layer" of the earliest modernity that supported the later Renaissance in the north in the 1500s, the "century of genius" (that is, the 1600s, time of the giants of modern science, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton), as well as the Enlightenment of the 1700s. (p.2)
What leads Dupre' to raise up that period of earliest modernity is the convergence then of "an early humanist notion of human creativity" and "the negative conclusions of nominalist theology." (p.3) He considers this convergence as a cultural explosion that had a massive effect: "Its impact shattered the organic unity of the Western view of the real." This explosive change destroyed the harmony of the whole, which prevailed from classical through medieval times. The consquence was modernity, described by Dupre' in the following passage:
The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature....This removal of transcendence fundamentally affected the conveyance of meaning. Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret a cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible. Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning. Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving "subject," the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality. Only what it objectively constituted would count as real. Thus reality split into two separate spheres: that of the mind, which contained all intellectual determinations, and that of all other being, which received them. (p.3)
Dupre' believes that the the modern "split" had a permanent effect on "the very essence of reality." (p.6) (Dupre' says: "Being must not be conceived as a substance unmoved by thought. Cultural changes leave a different reality in their wake." [p.10])
The power of the change to modernism persists, in Dupre's mind, even into postmodern critique of it. He believes that postmodernist critics of modernity "implicitly accept more of its assumptions than they are able to discard. Even those who globally reject its theoretical principles continue to build on them." (p.6) For example, he suggests that the self-referential nature of postmodern ideas of thought and language returns "speech to the central position from which the theory had expelled the speaking subject." (p.6) Moreover, by situating the problems of modernism in the 1400s, at the closing of the medieval period, he rejects Nietzsche's discovery of those problems in Socratic thought.
Dupre' ends his examination of the fragmentation of an ontotheological whole on a note of synthesis. Having shown us the details of the fragmentation through several centuries, he thus surprises us. Could the explosive outward forces of modernity have been contained in a saving reintegration? Dupre' explains how three movemements in the early modern period held such a possibility. One was the devout humanism of Ignatius of Loyola and of Francis de Sales. Another related movement was the "religion of the heart" of the Reformation. Finally, the cultural movement of "the Baroque" for Dupre' represented the "last comprehensive synthesis." He is pointing to the culture of Europe from about 1600 to about 1660. Here is his justification for this surprising coda:
Despite tensions and inconsistencies, a comprehensive spiritual vision united Baroque culture. At the center of it stands the person, confident in the ability to give form and structure to a nascent world. But...that center remains vertically linked to a transcendent source from which, via a descending scale of mediating bodies, the human creator draws his power. This dual center--human and divine--distinguishes the Baroque world picture from the vertical one of the Middle Ages, in which reality descends from a single transcendent point, as well as from the unproblematically horizontal one of later modern culture, prefuigured in some features of the Renaissance.
But he sees the Baroque begin to fall apart around 1660. The flat plain of modernity lay before the West.
The effect of Dupre's essay is to allow us to see postmodernism as such well within the boundaries of a deeply rooted modernity. Dupre' allows that modernity has defeated all cultural rivals. It is now the culture of the whole world, not just the West. (p. 249) However, he also acknowledges that modernity contains its "problem" that seeks resolution. The problem is the very split that defines it--the split between the cosmos, a transcendent source, and conscious human existence. He does not allow that resolution lies in recapturing it from the past: the ontological change that produced the modern subject cannot be reversed. But striving for change toward a different sort of synthesis, he thinks, is inherent in modernity itself. The stirrings and critiques of postmodern thinkers may be the tools of such striving.
That is not to say that Dupre' declares this. Nor is it to say that postmodern thinkers want such a synthesizing role. Yet, Dupre's groping for a picture of where modernity is headed rings true to the contemporary moment. New science, with its fractals and its strange attractors in chaos, might resonate to Dupre's thought. So might the philosophy of "desire" based on Nietzsche, found in Deleuze & Guattari's puzzling and provocative "body without organs." The spectre of negativity raised by "differance", the seeming hopelessness of a quest for stable meaning--these impressions of postmodernism may be the surfaces of a more substantial process going on in postmodernist thinking. Chaos theory allows that the self-reference within a process will lead to different order without benefit of guidance from without--desire on the wing, as it were. In view of that theory and other postmodernist notions, Dupre's final thought on the possibility of synthesis sounds interesting, even provocative:
[M]odernity has gained [autonomy] for the three components of culture: the spontaneity of a freedom recognized as an ontological principle, the sufficiency of a self-supporting cosmos, and the distinctness of a transcendence perceived as wholly encompassing the finite realm while intrinsically sustaining its autonomy. (p.251)
We are not certain what he means by his third point. But the passage as a whole begs to be seen as a call for the further development of modernity as a philosophical position. And the philosophical soldiers best equipped to push onward may well be those who have been mucking around in the swampy lowlands of postmodernist theory. For the past is past.
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