Our Debt to Modernity

Last updated on: May 18, 2007 at 2:00 pm by voxnovablog

Our Debt to Modernity 2007-05-18T14:00:00-05:00 voxnovablog

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Given the nature of a great number of the recent postings, it is clear that the present blog is clearly taking a direction that has as one of its central concerns the philosophico-theological notion of the “person.” In fact, it has been noted that the diverse constituents composing Vox Nova are united, despite their significant differences, in their “pro-person” attitude. Aware of the centrality of the notion of “personhood,” we are led to ask: what is entailed in our notion of personhood, especially for those of us who are approaching it from a Catholic perspective? What kind of intellectual—philosophical or theological—baggage is being imported, either knowingly or not, along with it? It is to the latter question that I wish to address myself at present, and my answer might come as a surprise to some and, to others, seem only trivial. Why? Because, as I see it, the notion of personhood, so central to contemporary Catholic theology and social teaching is almost as much indebted to the Enlightenment or Modernity as its is to Early Church and Medieval theology. To make my case I shall focus on the influence that two key modern figures (Descartes and Kant) had on Karol Wojtyla, who was undoubtedly one of the major figures in responsible for articulating a contemporary Catholic understanding of the person.

Early and High Medieval Notions of Personhood

Part of the marvel and greatness of Catholic theology has been its capacity and facility in assimilating the worldly wisdom that it encounters. Augustine, for instance, sang the praises of Plato. In fact, Augustine found so much wisdom and divine insight in the pagan that the African Doctor briefly entertained the notion that perhaps Plato had access to the Pentateuch (cf. De civitate Dei, VIII, cc. 6-9). Similarly, the philosophical influence that Aristotle had upon Thomas Aquinas, while often times over-exaggerated, is obvious enough. With respect to the concept of the person, Catholic theologians have likewise benefited from the secular wisdom of the Enlightenment.

First, we must ask: was there a notion of personhood operative prior to the Enlightenment? The answer is clearly “yes.” After all, the dogmas of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation can only be approached in light of some kind of theological understanding of the person. Boethius—with his treatise arguing against the Christological heretics, Netroius and Eutyches, De duabus naturae et una persona—sets the stage for the Medieval understanding of personhood. In fact, the notion of personhood achieved therein easily constitutes one of Christianity’s unique contributions to the West’s intellectual history since, prior to these Christian speculations, human beings were rarely thought of in terms of personhood, often regarded simply in terms of individuality or as parts of a civil organization. In point of fact, one may consider Aristotle’s comments in the Nicomachean Ethics as an illustration: “For even if the good is the same for the individual and the state, the good of the state clearly is the greater and more perfect thing to attain and to safeguard” (NE I.3.1094b8-9). Contrast that with Thomas Aquinas’s claim that “Intellectual creatures [i.e., persons] are ruled by God as though He cared for them for their own sake, while other creature are ruled as being directed to rational creatures… Therefore the intellectual nature alone is requisite for its own sake in the universe, and all others for its sake” (Summa contra gentiles III, c. 112) and the difference pagan thought and Christian wisdom becomes all the clearer.

And so, if we are going to tip our hat to modernity for its contribution to our present, Catholic understanding of the “person,” it cannot be because it gave birth to the very notion. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we are acknowledge a debt to modernity, it is simply because modernity helped make our concept of the person more robust and complete in significant and crucial ways. Despite the great strides that medieval theologians made in their understanding of the person as unique, as incommunicable, and as transcendentally related to God as to its ultimate end, there remains a rather significant lacuna in their thinking, for more often than not the person is considered solely in terms of its nature or essence, without any concern for its subjectivity. In fact, the person is often considered precisely as an “it,” or more precisely, as a thing (res), as one object in the world to be placed among others and metaphysically dissected and defined. And, yet, one’s personhood cannot be exhausted according to such objective considerations. In fact, most of us today would probably recoil at the very thought of being designated a “thing,” but yet in medieval metaphysics there was hardly any other way to proceed. The inner life, subjectivity, reflective consciousness, and lived-experience so central to a full account of the person received scant to no attention, certainly not thematically, in pre-Enlightenment thought. No, the world had to wait for its favorite scapegoat for all things evil, decadent, and distasteful, René Descartes, to be treated to such speculations.

René Descartes and Immanuel Kant

Without a doubt, inasmuch as he set epistemology before metaphysics and began with methodical doubt, Descartes forever changed the manner in which philosophers do philosophy, however, he had no intention of changing the way theologians do theology. Though he may be considered the father of modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Descartes was first and remained a loyal son of the Roman Catholic Church and saw himself as taking up and contributing to that tradition through finding a secure and indubitable foundation for it. That foundation, as history famously recounts, was the cogito: Je pense donc je suis! In short, while I can doubt the world, I cannot doubt my-self, my subjectivity. Now, whether or not one agrees or disagrees with Descartes’ philosophical method—in fact, there is grave reason to reject it altogether—one cannot doubt the significance of Descartes’ turn to the cogito, for in so doing, he made a decided turn toward subjectivity and toward a methodical examination of the inner life of the person. No longer considered simply in terms of a ‘rational animal’—a definition given in terms of genus and specific difference and, as such, proper only to things easily categorized by the mind—the human being is now regarded as, at the very least, a “thinking thing: res cogitans.” Of course, one may, if he is so inclined, dispense with the problem Cartesian metaphysics at work here, however, what is instructive for us is that we are presented with a phenomenology of our inner life, of our inner activity, in short, with a phenomenology of our very subjectivity.

Descartes’ phenomenology, albeit not the same in method, anthropology, and metaphysical presuppositions, is certainly the same in spirit operative behind a great deal of 20th-century phenomenological thought, including that of a number of phenomenologists who were arguably some of the most monumental figures in Catholic thought and intellectual life, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II). Here, I shall only focus on the latter. One need only consider the opening passages of Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility to recognize how indebted he is to the phenomenology spawned by the subjective turn to the self of modern philosophy. In that work (viz., LaR), we are presented with the basic tenants of a Thomistic anthropology, but Wojtyla clearly goes beyond that framework though his consideration of the person in terms of his subjectivity. Wojtyla discusses themes such as “inner self” and “inner life,” selfhood, and one’s self as a “center of consciousness.” Such a concern for one’s subjectivity finds little counterpart in pre-Modernity, but is easily at home with rationalist thinkers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, et al. And yet equally as influential in Wojtyla’s thought is the ethical thought of Immanuel Kant, another seminal figure in Enlightenment thought.

Kant had taught that the only possible basis for a pure a prior morality is what he called the “categorical imperative.” In one of his formulations of that imperative Kant writes, “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429). For Kant, a person cannot be considered as an object or a thing, for such can be used merely as a means to an end. Rather, a person is a certain kind of entity bestowed with a certain inalienable dignity and cannot ever be licitly objectified, and action that does so to another or even oneself is a violation of the moral law. Of course, the question one must inevitably put to Kant is: why are persons possessed of such dignity that they can only be considered as an end in themselves? Kant’s answer is because we are rational, possessed of a will that can determine its own end freely. It’s not a great stretch from Kant to Wojtyla’s personalistic norm, which norm states that “the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such as a means to an end” (LaR, 41).

The influence of modernity upon Karol Wojtyla is only one of several examples where contemporary Catholic thought has benefited from the insights of modernity–one could also mention other Catholic intellectuals such as: Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, to name only a few. Space and time prohibit us from offering any further examples. We must therefore risk the temptation to a certain “us and them” attitude, which regards all things modern as pernicious innovations of an ungodly age. The Enlightenment was no less godly than the ancient world, and whatever wisdom there may be found contained therein is always ripe for Catholic intellectual picking. But, lest we be like an infant who places anything and everything in his mouth without discrimination, prudence demands that we examine that which we’re consuming so that, at the very least, we can spit out any rotten portions of our plucked fruit.

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