TheMightieFrame:EpochalChangeandtheModern WorldNicholasGreenwoodOnuf
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-mightie-frame-epochalchange-and-the-modern-world-nicholas-greenwood-onuf/
Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) ready for you
Download now and discover formats that fit your needs...
The Spotted Dog Kerry Greenwood
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-spotted-dog-kerry-greenwood/ ebookmass.com
The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the TwentyFirst Century (World Social Change) 5th Edition Marks Whittier College
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-origins-of-the-modern-world-aglobal-and-environmental-narrative-from-the-fifteenth-to-the-twentyfirst-century-world-social-change-5th-edition-marks-whittier-college/ ebookmass.com
A Short History of the Ancient World Nicholas K. Rauh
https://ebookmass.com/product/a-short-history-of-the-ancient-worldnicholas-k-rauh/ ebookmass.com
Chain Reaction (Brantley Walker: Off the Books Book 10)
Nicole Edwards
https://ebookmass.com/product/chain-reaction-brantley-walker-off-thebooks-book-10-nicole-edwards/ ebookmass.com
Medical-Surgical Nursing : Concepts for Interprofessional Collaborative Care 10th Edition Donna D. Ignatavicius
https://ebookmass.com/product/medical-surgical-nursing-concepts-forinterprofessional-collaborative-care-10th-edition-donna-dignatavicius/
ebookmass.com
Food wastes and by-products : nutraceutical and health potential First Edition Campos Vega
https://ebookmass.com/product/food-wastes-and-by-productsnutraceutical-and-health-potential-first-edition-campos-vega/
ebookmass.com
Nationalism and the Politicization of History in the Former Yugoslavia Gorana Ognjenovic
https://ebookmass.com/product/nationalism-and-the-politicization-ofhistory-in-the-former-yugoslavia-gorana-ognjenovic/
ebookmass.com
The Sisters Café Carolyn Brown
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-sisters-cafe-carolyn-brown-2/
ebookmass.com
A Beginner’s Guide to Watercolor Painting : Step-by-Step
Lessons for Portraits, Landscapes and Still LifesIncludes 16 Practice Postcards Takako Y. Miyoshi
https://ebookmass.com/product/a-beginners-guide-to-watercolorpainting-step-by-step-lessons-for-portraits-landscapes-and-stilllifes-includes-16-practice-postcards-takako-y-miyoshi/
ebookmass.com
Kathy A. Zahler
https://ebookmass.com/product/conquering-gre-verbal-reasoning-andanalytical-writing-kathy-a-zahler/
ebookmass.com
The Mightie Frame
The Mightie Frame
Epochal Change and the Modern World
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–087980–8
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For my friends in many worlds
The mightie Frame, how build, unbuild, contrive To save appeerances
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book 8, lines 81–82
CONTENTS
Prologue: Refreshing Metaphors 1
CHAPTER 1 What Can We Know? 12
CHAPTER 2 Modernity’s Mighty Frame 29
CHAPTER 3 Traditional Societies 52
CHAPTER 4 Transitional Figures: Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf 64
First Interlude: “Working Models” 88
CHAPTER 5 “This Quarter of the Globe” 91
CHAPTER 6 Transitional Figures: Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, James Madison 102
CHAPTER 7 State-Nations 123
CHAPTER 8 Transitional Figures: Edmund Husserl, Emile Durkheim, the Fabian Society 135
Second Interlude: Growth Rates 158
CHAPTER 9 Epochal Destruction 161
CHAPTER 10 Transitional Figures: J. L. Austin, Jay Forrester, Donna Haraway 172
CHAPTER 11 Paradise Lost? 195
CHAPTER 12 Relative Virtue 207
Epilogue: “Saving Constructivism” 224
Acknowledgments 235
References 241
Index: Concepts 259
Index: People 269
The Mightie Frame
PROLOGUE Refreshing Metaphors
In this book, I tell a story—a long story consisting of a tightly linked sequence of discrete parts. Each part, or chapter, is more or less sufficient in itself, yet each finds me constantly picking up and playing out distinct variations on a few overarching themes. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it tells a story about modernity and its epochs. Readers will quickly notice that this story is studded with a number of terms, such as frame, epoch, period, transition, and rupture, giving the story its shape, texture, and momentum. I suggest the reason for this is that each of these terms (story, frame, gift, texture, and so on) is a metaphor signaling a distinctive range of associations. A standard definition tells us that a metaphor is a “figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness” (MerriamWebster Online Dictionary). As Aristotle taught, we use figures of speech not just to represent states of affairs but to persuade others to accept our representations—to use them as we do. In short, representation is always for a purpose, to an end.
Aristotle insisted that a good, effective metaphor must be fitting and it must be fresh (Rhetoric, 1410b13, 1410b32–33). An empirical realist, he meant that a metaphor must approximate some state of affairs as it really is. I suggest that a metaphor can only represent a state of affairs as it has already been represented, for persuasive purposes, through other, familiar metaphors. In other words, metaphors are all that we (as a metaphorical community of speakers) have to make sense of the “world” as it appears to us (individually). There are no “literal” representations. Good metaphors fit our received understanding of the way the world is well enough to persuade others to “see” that world differently. Bad metaphors fail to do so. A fresh metaphor is one that alters the way we see the world in some way that we are receptive to. As a general matter, we are not receptive to
drastic shifts of understanding; fit and freshness stand in close relation. Over time, fit, fresh metaphors are put to use so often that they make the world fit them even as they lose their freshness. They become abstract terms, or concepts. While they may appear to be as “natural” as the state of affairs they represent, I would say instead that every concept started off, and remains salient or useful, as a metaphor that finds a place among a large number of related metaphors.
Speaking metaphorically, metaphors wear down or fade away unless they are continuously refreshed. Let me speculate briefly on how this process works. Take the word rupture. I cannot myself use this term without conjuring up images of broken bones, torn flesh, blood and gore, grievous wounds that may, or may not, lead to death. There is nothing fresh about these images as such. Nevertheless, in their concrete specificity, they refresh the abstraction—they make it fresh without apparently affecting its fit.
Rupture is a favored metaphor in Michel Foucault’s writings, where it conveys an awful sense of violence—the violation of bodily integrity. Foucault’s metaphorical preferences figure prominently in this book. Thus I might have used puncture instead of rupture. After all, its cognate, punctuation, is refreshed by continuous association with language use. Less often, Foucault and I have both used the metaphor period, refreshed as it is by association with the craft of writing: a sentence ends, full stop, the next sentence begins, and yet the story flows from sentence to sentence.
Nevertheless, puncture and rupture produce contrary images, at least for me: piercing versus bursting, in versus out; clean versus messy. Rupture better fits my sense of what goes in social relations, as I think it did for Foucault. But do not look for consistency. Both Foucault and I use the less vivid metaphors transition and transformation. In The Order of Things (1970), Foucault favored transformation. I prefer transition, an even blander metaphor for going from one place (Latin, situs) to another. Both terms convey a sense that ruptures in social relations have an aftermath; society goes on, if not as before.
If we did not refresh concepts in the way I have just described, they would lose their place in any system of metaphors, all of which are subject to refreshing in the same way. It should be obvious that we all refresh concepts—recharge them metaphorically—with different images reflecting a large variety of life experiences, and that we do it all the time. As far as I know, the concept of metaphorical refreshment is new. There is, however, nothing new about the fabric of concepts in which this claim is lodged.
We all have a stock of words, names, or signs that we have been accumulating ever since we learned to speak; for most practical purposes, all of us take for granted that these signs refer to the world in its many aspects—they mean more or less the same thing to the people using them. While I do not endorse Henri Bergson’s vitalist metaphysics, I cannot resist quoting him here.
The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore perceives only accidents. But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of words—accidents called up by accidents—to the conception of the Idea that posits its own being. (1911, 338)
An “image” arises from an individual’s perceptual-cognitive faculties; it is uniquely mine, or yours. As such, it resembles John Locke’s “idea” but not Bergson’s. For the latter, “idea” is eidos or form—“at bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act supposed accomplished” (1911, 332, emphasis in translation). In Chapter 1, I say more about form. In that chapter, I also suggest that David Hume’s “impression” is a better metaphor than “image” for my purposes.
For the moment, I stay with image only because it is such a familiar metaphor in this context. By contrast, a concept is associated with an image that seems to be held in common to the point that it has acquired a name or sign linking it to other concepts. It acquires form. Images are private, direct, and concrete; concepts are public, mediated by and through other concepts, and abstract. “Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world” (Winch 1990, 15).
The process by which images are made public and become concepts depends on finding names or signs that point to similarities in images that, from one person to the next, can never be identical. Life experiences, registered and recalled as images, are subject to public articulation through metaphors. That our metaphorical choices converge and overlap so
extensively grant us a shared sense, however rough at the edges, of being members of a community (a concept subject to constant refreshment)— a community of speakers. That same sense explains why metaphors are contagious in the first instance and why they continue to function as concepts. It also points to problems of translation and commensurability across communities and over time. It would seem then that most concepts are refreshed at the edges (here again I take advantage of a potent, constantly refreshed metaphor). As conceptual historians emphasize, this process offers well-placed speakers an ever-changing palette of opportunities to contest and adjudicate abstractly framed assertions of fact, cause, and principle.
What then is a community of speakers? Every community is a world; each of us lives in many worlds, which each of us experiences as a single world of our own. I suggest that a community of speakers, a world, exists when its members put a common store of concepts to use for similar purposes, the most general of which is to tell a story about themselves as a community. Every such story extols the moral and political purpose that the members of the community are collectively committed to; every telling of the story affirms their commitment. That members of a community of speakers can use apparently abstract concepts for this most general of purposes is only possible because they refresh these concepts more or less the same way—that is, by drawing on images that come to mind as they speak. We assume that other people are working with the same images we are. Only occasionally do we feel that we need to “clarify” a concept by invoking an image or remind each other what we have “in mind.”
For the most part, the process of refreshing concepts is barely visible as we tell our stories. Commonly held images are basic, that is, rooted in the long, dense histories of the words/metaphors/concepts—histories of refreshment—that we rely on to tell our stories. Once we look for the conspicuous or (to switch metaphors) key concepts for a community of speakers, we have the keys to the story they tell about the world as it appears to them. The metaphors they choose give their story away because they give the story its large and abiding themes.
To give a pertinent example, the metaphors story and history have a common history until the Renaissance, when it began to matter whether the events in a narration of the past actually took place. Previously, events were what people said they had seen or heard about something that had been seen. In effect, the Latin verb videre, to see, refreshed story and history as interchangeable terms. Afterward, history was refreshed by association with veracity or truth (Latin, verus), and story by association with
imaginative (re)telling. As scholars, many historians adopted the conceptual strategies, methodological mandates, and discursive conventions of positivist science. Facts were to be documented, large claims qualified, the historian’s values suppressed, and ringing rhetoric resisted.
In recent decades, however, scholars dispensing with positivist science have begun to see themselves as story tellers. Historians have found renewed respect for their narrative skills. In my field of study, International Relations, most scholars hew to the canons of positivist science, but some of us readily acknowledge that we tell stories. We do so with an appreciation for documentation, an enforced modesty in making large claims, recognition that values suffuse every story, but perhaps less awareness than we should have that metaphors rule our thematic choices. We judge these stories on plausibility and coherence before locating them in the large economy of power and knowledge.
Here I tell a big story. Its subject is the modern world; the story takes place over several centuries. I take the advent of this world to have been a transformative event, and not merely a transition. I go on to tell this story with unearned authority and uneven documentation; I indulge in largely unsubstantiated conjectures. I do so in full recognition that it is the story of a large community of speakers to which I belong and whose values I have assimilated. Many readers will justly accuse me of Eurocentrism, for I make less effort than many of my peers to tell the story as if I were an outsider, an observer from afar. I do not postulate “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000), dwell on colonial barbarities, recapitulate theories of imperialism, or apologize for the modern world’s ingrained racism and ritualized hypocrisies. Insofar as I stand in judgment, and in this book issue a verdict ( Chapter 11), I do so with great sadness for what this community of mine has wrought.
Obviously this book is not a history of the modern world, much less a “global history” such as Jürgen Osterhammel’s (2014)—it does not select among a vast number of recorded items in order to tell its story over a thousand or more pages. If it is less than history, it is more than just a story. I might have styled it a grand theory but for the pretensions of this turn of phrase. The book does present a theoretical framework, although it is theoretical only in the loosest sense of the term—a sense befitting the field of International Relations, in which I have labored as a “theorist” for fifty years. Rather, it is a report on a project, long pursued, written in fits and starts, ever shifting in form and thrust. Perhaps I should say: the second half of a decades-long project, the first half of which took form as World of Our Making (1989).
In that book, I endeavored to frame the workings of any society in general terms nevertheless directly applicable to the study of international relations. Looking back, I see how much I favored space and structure over time and change. In this book, I do not reverse the order of priority. Instead I add a fourth dimension to the framework that I put forward those many years ago. More precisely, I spatialize time for the purpose of completing the framework. I do so by limiting myself to the experience of modernity and sketching five successive epochs (a term I often use) or ages (Foucault’s term, and one I also use) to frame my project. Each epoch is stylized as a unit of space-time, but only for expository purposes. Because I do not treat epochal transitions as sharp breaks, they too are stylized space-time units.
The first of the five epochs is the Renaissance as the age of similitudes. In its wake is the classical epoch as the age of tables, which I could just as well call the age of the frame. On both, I follow Foucault closely. Next is the modern epoch—an age of exponential growth and changing scales. Then follows the modernist age, which Foucault failed to identify as such but I would call the modern epoch turned inside-out. Last comes the epoch at hand, Foucault’s “end of man,” more generally known as the postmodern age. This is an epoch as yet unnamed, an age about which all must be conjectured. It may not happen at all, the so-called modern world collapsing instead. While Foucault seems not to have countenanced this possibility, I give it some consideration as this book comes to a close.
Writing together, my brother (who is a historian) and I have styled such a project conjectural history (see Onuf and Onuf 2006). Anne-RobertJacques Turgot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, among others of their time, undertook similar projects in a time of transition from the world transposed to a table to a world transformed in scale. Kant and Smith did so within frameworks to which I give due consideration in later chapters. At the limits of science, contemporary cosmologists offer competing conjectures about “the historical character of the universe,” sometimes framing them in philosophical terms (see, for example, Unger and Smollin 2015, quoting p. xiii). On a less grandiose scale, anticipating a time of transition, Foucault’s extraordinary book The Order of Things is also best thought of as conjectural history as well as an inspiration for this book.
The Order of Things is philosophically aware but evasive. This is, in my view, a shortcoming that I have tried to avoid for myself; Chapter 1 sketches a philosophical backdrop for the framework that I develop from chapter to chapter. Its function is to position the story of a community of
speakers in relation to the teller as a member of that community. In effect, I reformulate Foucault’s question, “What can we know?” to ask, What do I, here and now, think I can know, and why do I think this? I am obliged to say that my answer is not one that most of my peers find congenial. It reinforces my decision not to start with a set of theoretical claims about the way the world works. At various points in the story, I repeat claims of this sort that I have made at other times. I ask readers who may be familiar with these claims to see them now in a context that I had myself not fully appreciated.
The next ten chapters tell the story of modernity and its epochs in recognizably Foucauldian terms. For all of Foucault’s influence, few scholars still pay much attention to the “young” Foucault and his “archeology of the human sciences” (the subtitle of The Order of Things). They are too deferential to say outright what they think: his book is an oldfashioned, discredited exercise in “stagist” history—in short, a reversion to historicism. According to the influential postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, historicists give “an underlying structural unity (if not an expressive totality) to historical process and time that makes it possible to identify certain elements in the present as ‘anachronistic’ ” (2000, quoting 14, 12; for an airbrushed assessment of Foucault, see p. 6). In this view, anachronisms reveal the direction of change; they constitute an inversely calibrated measure of progress. In my view (and I think Foucault’s), talking about ages, stages, periods, or epochs does not imply that history—not anyone’s story but, as we so often say, the flow of events—is going anywhere in particular.
Foucault failed to say clearly enough that no age fully displaces the age preceding. The charge of anachronism assumes that one sees the continued presence of the past as a matter of “survivals” and “remnants” (Chakrabarty 2000, 12; his scare marks). I do not. With Foucault, I do think that history is a viscous fluid (1972, 172; see also Chapter 2). It moves through time in irregular waves or pulses, each constituting its own conditions of possibility—cognitively and thus materially. Conditions of possibility compound and commingle. Earlier conditions seem to diminish in importance as new ones commandeer attention, but none disappears unless the flow of events comes to an abrupt end. So conceived, history has the structure of any observer’s construction of events but no unity. It is an “expressive totality” because every story is an expressive totality by definition, even Chakrabarty’s story about “postcolonial thought and historical difference” (the subtitle of his Provincializing Europe).
Such, in any event, is the story I tell in these pages. The last chapter goes back to the first chapter’s concern with positioning the story in
relation to its teller. Asking “What can we know?” leads to a second question: “How should we act?” If Chapter 1 is a philosophical memoir, then the last chapter is a complementary memoir on the ethical and political implications of the story I tell and, in its background, my sense of what I can know, here in this community, in an epoch whose character and fate are open to conjecture. Colleagues who find my philosophical stance uncongenial are also likely to find my conclusions about ethics and finally about politics unappealing and perhaps even inexplicable. So will most lay readers. While I espouse an ethics oriented to duty, I feel no duty to alter my conclusions so that others might plausibly act on them.
The first and last chapters anchor the story in place and time—they situate the story within its mighty frame even as they have me standing outside the frame, inside the story. The intervening ten chapters do not summarize what happened within and between epochs. To call them overviews calls on an ill-fitting metaphor. While I have been using the imagery of images, any such simile downplays the subjective, obviously selective yet carefully structured character (in Greek, kharaktēr, or engraved mark) of each chapter. They are impressions of a particular sort, graphic illustrations, copies of an impression (cf. Derrida 1996, 26–28) rather like images chiseled in wood, slathered with ink and pressed upon the page. These I have arranged in an extended series of thirty-six panes. In sequence, they call to mind a graphic novel in which deliberately crude drawings tell the story.
Graphic artists do not burden their work with scholarly paraphernalia, and I have followed their practice to the extent possible. There are no distracting footnotes or endnotes. To give my story coherence, I point readers to relevant discussion elsewhere in the text. To enhance the story’s plausibility, I provide in-text references for all quotations and scholarship that has directly influenced what I am trying to say. I do not pretend to have cited all relevant materials; to do so would burden the story unduly. I cite my own work when I have developed themes or arguments elsewhere in greater detail. My aim: keep the book short, link and support its conjectures in a sturdy frame, let the story take off.
Each chapter has a short introduction framing its panes, and I pause twice, after Chapters 4 and 8, to give my framework some additional support. I wrote the first and last chapters first, so as to contain and enfold my story, and then proceeded to write chapters more or less in sequence, with various delays and interruptions (and notice the metaphorical presence of ruptures that impede, not terminate). Many of those chapters assemble and rework writings of mine that, in some instances, go back for decades.
Reflecting as they do my diverse and evolving interests, these materials do not always seem to go together; cumulatively they make the story altogether unlike any other story told of modernity’s half-millennium.
Nevertheless I believe readers will have little difficulty in picking out the large themes that give the book its framework and, switching metaphors, its momentum. The framing conceit is the “mighty frame” simultaneously fixing the limits of possible knowledge for modern minds and the conditions of rule in the modern world. (Chapter 1 explores the context for the passage from John Milton’s Paradise Lost that serves as this book’s epigraph and prompting its title.) From epoch to epoch, the mighty frame has added features that continue to function even as they recede from view. As a metaphor, frame is highly suggestive: a form (eidos), but much more, an idea given a set form for some use. Typically frames are geometrically configured, built from the ground up, stood upon a flat surface or hung from a wall, created to enclose, contain or house some things in the world, and seen as if the observer is standing in front of a picture.
Frame is also a verb, now always transitive, conveying a sense of deliberate and sustained activity involving skill or craft. Martin Heidegger held that craft (technē) informs Western thought from the time of the Greeks and eventuates in the distinctively modern disposition to see the world as a picture (1977, essay 4). In this context, Heidegger introduced the neologism enframing (Ge-stell), which I would adopt were it not so burdened with Heidegger’s philosophical preoccupations (essay 1). I would like to say that enframing is what we do, and then ask, who is this we? Humans? Inheritors of Greek metaphysics? Denizens of the modern world? While this question intrudes periodically in my story, a different question, a puzzle, motivated me to tell the story as I do. How have we who are modern managed to enframe our world? If this book is something like a graphic novel, or perhaps a guided tour through a museum, the experience of modernity is not, after all, just a succession of familiar pictures, their frames lined up in a row.
With this puzzle in mind, I made the chapters devoted to the transition from epoch to epoch roughly twice the length of chapters describing the state of the modern world between its great ruptures. Longer chapters tilt toward limits on how we moderns have come to think as we do, shorter chapters toward the ways in which we rule ourselves. As we approach our own time, ruptures are harder to date. They seem to take longer—more like a gradual transition than a sudden burst. I want to emphasize that none of these great events is complete, that ruptures are not terminal. Significant
elements of each epoch persist, perhaps attenuated, often entangled with elements of later epochs, and sometimes even amplifying them.
Throughout I quote from what I take to be indicative texts, sometime at length, to capture the moment as framed. While their choice inevitably reflects the direction and limits of my own interests as a scholar, I have also ventured into discursive worlds with which I had little prior familiarity— as specialists would no doubt immediately surmise. While I could have engaged more extensively in the literature of my own field of study, I have chosen not to for several reasons. As I have already emphasized, this is a story; it is not an effort to add to or revise some cumulative store of reliable knowledge. The every effort to document the current state of knowledge in my field would all too clearly reveal how ill informed I am about the scholarship on many of the topics that I bring to attention. More important, dealing in any greater depth with the scholarship in my field would vitiate my large claim that this is a story about the modern world writ large, and not simply a story about the changing features of international relations in a changing world. As it is, I cannot squelch the scholarly impulse to speak more or less directly to my colleagues on sundry occasions.
Chapter by chapter, the story becomes more complicated. To keep things manageable, I leave a great deal unsaid—without explanation or apology. Thus one might wonder why I ignore the Reformation as a central event of the Renaissance with vast implications for the onset of the classical age. Indeed I largely ignore articles of faith as a species of knowledge. There are two reasons for my doing so.
As the Reformation illustrates, faith is not immune to change in its own terms. Yet such changes do not correlate closely with the epochal changes that my story is about. Sometimes faith-dependent knowledge functions as a brake on other changes and sometimes as a distant engine; the relevant causal sequences resist untangling, the putative mechanism is indiscernible. To give faith and the faithful the attention that some readers may think they deserve would slow down my story, disrupt the economy of its telling. Moreover, conditions of faith and conditions of rule are related in ways that constitute an altogether different story, one with its own tempo and contemporary significance. The Reformation’s impact on the royal houses of Europe, and on their relations, is a story unto itself, an important story about faith and rule (Nexon 2009 tells it well). Aside from its bearing on the Westphalian settlement (Chapter 5), it is not my story.
Or one might ask why I spend several pages on phenomenology in Chapter 8 and do not even mention pragmatism. Again there are two reasons. Pragmatism is a late, expedient effort to save modern positivism
from itself; phenomenology is modernist in its functionalist underpinnings and, as a bonus, more relevant to the philosophical stance that I develop over the course of the book. More generally, my strong claim that modernism is an epochal rupture in the way we think and in the way we live together will strike many readers as implausible. This is just how two excellent scholars in my field of study—Ned Lebow and Jens Steffek— have reacted to this claim. Conversely, I believe that they have erased the differences between what is merely modern and what is modernist in their work (Lebow 2009, Steffek forthcoming). While I think a functionalist stance unites developments in the arts, philosophy, and social theory, both incline to the view that these developments are not linked in a global causal sequence.
On philosophical grounds, I quite agree with them—there is no objective condition corresponding to what I call an epoch or causal relation explaining a succession of epochs. I offer a working model with functional, not causal, underpinnings (see the first Interlude). Oddly, Lebow’s and Steffek’s objections to this global model are, in my view, modernist; Lebow and Steffek seem to believe that functional differentiation, rampant a century ago and even more today, vitiates my globalizing model. I might even call my model postmodernist in its general contours because it draws inspiration from modernist sources without being constrained by the limits and shortcomings of functionalist thinking. Of course, my model has many other sources, and so do theirs. This deliberate eclecticism may indeed be a large feature of the epochal moment—not yet postmodern in which the three of us are working.
As these two examples suggests, I am not using an off-the-shelf model. The story I am telling is my story. As the story proceeds, its telling is all the more idiosyncratic. However tenuously, reference to frames and framing give the story its frame. At no point do I pretend that this is the whole story or indeed anything remotely resembling the conventional story of modernity’s half-millennium rocket-ride.
CHAPTER 1
What Can We Know?
“Qu’est-il donc impossible de penser, et de quelle impossibilité s’agit il?” Michel Foucault asked this question in the preface to Les mots et les choses (1966). The English translation is perhaps even more arresting: “But what is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here?” (Foucault 1970, xv). The question does not concern what is logically possible. Foucault followed it with an exceedingly odd list of things, properties, and relations, thus implying that the impossible is what most people think is laughable or ludicrous. The list itself is a brilliant, much recited confection that Jorge Luis Borges had devised as a taxonomy of animals—absurd in its own terms—and attributed to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia.”
Having thus engaged the reader’s attention, Foucault gave little further attention, in The Order of Things (or anywhere else in his work), to what is impossible to think. We cannot know what we cannot think. His concern was Immanuel Kant’s, his reaction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason always in the background (see Chapter 6). What is it possible for us, as cognitively competent human beings, to know? For Foucault, this question translated into a question of cognitive limits, of discontinuities in thought: what are the “conditions of possibility of all knowledge” (1970, 167), and do they change?
For Kant it was first of all a question of appearances: how do the faculties of mind account for the way things seem to any one of us? In turn, the question of appearances—phainomena goes back to Aristotle and his realist challenge to Plato’s idealism. Perhaps all roads lead back to Aristotle. In this book, however, the road goes back and forth between Aristotle and Foucault by way of Kant. Its verges are the limits on what I find it possible to think, and say, about epochal change in the modern world.
Appearances
In Nicomachean Ethics (1145b4–7), Aristotle touched on the way he went about his work before turning to akrasia (lack of self-control, to which I return in Chapter 12). “Here, as in all other cases, we must set down the appearances (phainomena), and first working through all the puzzles (diaporēsantas), in this way go on to show, if possible, the truth of all the beliefs we hold . . .” This translation is Martha Nussbaum’s (1986, 240). As for method, this brief passage gives little guidance; Aristotle usually put his puzzles in a checklist (see Chapter 12) and proceeded to consider them one after the other.
This brief passage does, however, direct attention to Aristotle’s philosophical stance. Whether concerned with shellfish or self-control, as Nussbaum remarked, Aristotle was “describing the world as it appears to, as it is experienced by, observers who are members of our kind” (245, her emphasis). Why a third term, appearances, mediating world and observer? Is this world more, or other, than what we experience? What is the sense of this term as Aristotle put it to use?
The verb stem for the Greek noun phainomena is phainein, “to bring to light,” “to show,” deriving from the proto-Indo-European verb *bha-, “to shine.” The Latin verb stem for appearance, apparere, has a different origin but converging sense: “to come into light,” deriving the proto-Indo-European root *per-, “to bring forth.” These barely sketched etymologies prefigure a general question (as does the German verb stem scheinen, to shine, appear). What or who brings the light? There is, on the one hand, an active sense of the world making an appearance, of the world intruding on our attention—the world does the bringing; if we pay attention to the way things seem to be, we can get along in the world. On the other hand, when we make an appearance in the world, we bring it to light; indeed we throw ourselves at the world, knowing from experience that appearances are deceiving, that we can exercise some degree on control over appearances and that we may have good reasons to save appearances.
A conventional empirical realist takes the world to be more or less as it seems when we act on it and see it change. “To save appearances” was a familiar turn of phrase when it appeared in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, first applied to Plato’s project (and Aristotle’s too) of accounting for the circular motion of the stars and the wayward path of the planets, and then the sixteenth-century controversy over Ptolemaic-geocentric and
Copernican-heliocentric models of celestial motion. Thus the passage that gives this book its title and serves as its motto continues:
. . . how gird the Sphear
With Centric and Eccentric scribl’d o’er Cycle and Epicycle, Orb and Orb (Book 8, lines 82–84)
Both models manage to save what observation had long made known (Duhem 1969; Kuhn 1985). Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published the year he died, 1543, shows him duly cautious about his model’s relation to reality, and for good reason. In the book’s Ad lectorem (Notice to readers), Andreas Osiander, a Protestant theologian who had seen Copernicus’s book to publication, sought to disarm opponents intent on upholding both scriptural and Aristotelian authority against Copernicus’s implicitly realist challenge:
For it is the job of an astronomer to use painstaking and skilled observation in gathering together the history of the celestial movements, and then— since he cannot by any line of reasoning reach the true causes of these movements—to think up or construct whatever causes or hypotheses he pleases such that, by the assumption of these causes, those same movements can be calculated from the principles of geometry for the past and for the future too. This artist is markedly outstanding in both of these respects: for it is not necessary that these hypotheses be true, or even probably; but it is enough if they provide a calculus which fits the observations. (Copernicus 1995, 3)
Centuries later, what it is possible to think has changed dramatically. On the authority of Galilean science, not to mention personal experience such as science makes possible, few of us can doubt that the earth really does revolve around the sun. Nevertheless, I subscribe to Osiander’s point of view. With due thanks to David Hume’s skepticism, I follow Kant’s so-called Copernican revolution to make sense of appearances—of what “skilled observation” allows us to think about. Indeed, I take Osiander, Hume, and Kant where they could not have gone.
Observing the world is never passive or neutral. As agents, observers act on the world they see, just as the world acts on them by changing how it seems to be, if only for them. Aristotle made sense of this relation by granting complementary ends or purposes to the world and its constituents and impelling observers such as himself to look beyond appearances to
the functional relation of parts to wholes. Part and whole perform a necessary function for the other’s appearance—coming into agents’ sight and seeming to be what the agent sees. A functionalist point of view must always acknowledge Aristotle and his subtle conception of appearances. Without assuming the world is a purposive whole (or that the world has any other intrinsic properties), this point of view is integral to the philosophical stance that I develop in this chapter and rely on hereafter.
While Kant viewed the world as a purposive whole in his not very original contributions to social thought (most conspicuously, in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 1784, and “Perpetual Peace,” 1795; Kant 1991a, b), the Critique of Pure Reason is notable for the absence of any systematic discussion of the concept of world. This is in contrast to Martin Heidegger’s equally ambitious Being and Time (1927)— strikingly but perhaps predictably, since Kant aimed for a revolution in epistemology and Heidegger in ontology. Kant’s great work does frequently mention the world of the senses ( die Sinnenwelt ); this is the world Heidegger identified with “Being- present- at- hand” (1962, 67). Instead Kant paid strict attention to appearances ( Erscheinungen ).
He started with “objects” (Gegenstände). An object “is given to us,” through our sensory organs, as an “empirical intuition” (empirischen Anschauung). In English at least, this formulation is misleading, since we normally speak of intuition as awareness beyond immediate sensory confirmation. Space and time as “pure intuition” (reine Anschauung) prior to sensory experience may be closer to the ordinary English sense of intuition as a kind of unsupported awareness, but does not, in my opinion, warrant Kant’s starting point. Space and time may, a priori, frame a world for us, but not necessarily a world of objects.
In any event, Kant would seem to have backed away from his starting point when he wrote: “the undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled an appearance” (A19–21 [1st ed., 1781]/B33–35 [2nd ed., 1787]; Kant 1965, 65–66, for all quotations in this and the preceding paragraph; emphases in translation). How can an “undetermined object” be an object at all? When he proceeded to say that “the appearance which corresponds to sensation I term its matter; but that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance,” I see him reaffirming the prior existence of objects as objects. Our senses make them available to us: they are as they seem— determined, real, things-in-themselves by virtue of their properties and relations.
