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Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that humanistic concepts they seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.
A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.
“[A] learned, deeply important, and accomplished study . . . that calls upon a set of interpretive and communal traditions that, far from being fossilized, contain radical and renovating power, but whose power can be called on, extended, elaborated, and applied to the present and future only if one knows that those traditions can and do remain alive and available, and that we ignore or pronounce them 'past' at our peril. The sweep and comprehensiveness of the work are remarkable. This is not a history of philosophy at all. It is a call for us to rededicate ourselves to a serious, demanding practice of humanistic studies.” —James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
"Minding the Modern is comparable to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. With extraordinary erudition, Pfau locates the philosophical developments that contributed to the agony of the modern mind. Moreover, he helps us see why many who exemplify that intellectual stance do not recognize their own despair. Suffice it to say, this is an immensely important book that hopefully will be read widely and across the disciplines." —Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School
A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.
“[A] learned, deeply important, and accomplished study . . . that calls upon a set of interpretive and communal traditions that, far from being fossilized, contain radical and renovating power, but whose power can be called on, extended, elaborated, and applied to the present and future only if one knows that those traditions can and do remain alive and available, and that we ignore or pronounce them 'past' at our peril. The sweep and comprehensiveness of the work are remarkable. This is not a history of philosophy at all. It is a call for us to rededicate ourselves to a serious, demanding practice of humanistic studies.” —James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
"Minding the Modern is comparable to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. With extraordinary erudition, Pfau locates the philosophical developments that contributed to the agony of the modern mind. Moreover, he helps us see why many who exemplify that intellectual stance do not recognize their own despair. Suffice it to say, this is an immensely important book that hopefully will be read widely and across the disciplines." —Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School
684 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 2, 2016
I've been slowly working through this book for months. It is one of those books that I absolutely enjoy reading even though it stretches (melts might be a better word) my brain.* Sometimes I wonder why I plod my way through books like this one. Perhaps it is the temptation of the pragmatic and consumeristic world we live in - why read books like this when there are tons of easier and more entertaining, and applicable, books out there.
Well, why spend a couple hours preparing a nice, delicious and healthy meal when there is fast food?
Basically, in this book Pfau traces the relationship of the human will and reason from Plato into the modern world. Up until William of Ockham the will and reason were seen as participating in a divine reason. Ockham began the loosening of this and prepared the way for the modern world. Pfau's book ends up being a huge critique of the modern view of will and reason. Modernity led to determinism, the idea that there really is no reason but that we just will whatever phenomena move us to. In this there is no real hope for meaning or any good foundation for ethics. One way Pfau puts it is that infinity became something terrifying - an infinite future in which we humans are a meaningless speck. Contrast this to infinity being tied in to God into whom we live and move and find our being.
If you are into some philosophy and like a heavy read, this one is certainly for you. It is right up there with other books tracing the formation of the modern world.
*Other books on this list, all in my top ten of all time, would be A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart and Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. I'd include After Virtue by Alasdair McIntyre in this list, but I actually got most of what he was saying!
Well, why spend a couple hours preparing a nice, delicious and healthy meal when there is fast food?
Basically, in this book Pfau traces the relationship of the human will and reason from Plato into the modern world. Up until William of Ockham the will and reason were seen as participating in a divine reason. Ockham began the loosening of this and prepared the way for the modern world. Pfau's book ends up being a huge critique of the modern view of will and reason. Modernity led to determinism, the idea that there really is no reason but that we just will whatever phenomena move us to. In this there is no real hope for meaning or any good foundation for ethics. One way Pfau puts it is that infinity became something terrifying - an infinite future in which we humans are a meaningless speck. Contrast this to infinity being tied in to God into whom we live and move and find our being.
If you are into some philosophy and like a heavy read, this one is certainly for you. It is right up there with other books tracing the formation of the modern world.
*Other books on this list, all in my top ten of all time, would be A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart and Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. I'd include After Virtue by Alasdair McIntyre in this list, but I actually got most of what he was saying!
March 8, 2018
I don't agree with Pfau's Catholic account of things in this book, but he really is to be commended for standing up for Paul Griffiths amid the Duke Divinity School mess. See here too.
I stopped attending the reading group when they started meeting the second semester (Jan. 11, 2017).
From what I have read, it looks like another Catholic rebuke of Protestantism as the fountainhead of Modernity (see Taylor's A Secular Age, Carroll's Protestant Modernity [which I haven't read], and Gregory's The Unintended Reformation). See links in my review of Gregory's The Unintended Reformation.
From Matthew Milliner's review at Books & Culture: "[T]here is a . . . serious concern with grand narratives that I am describing, namely that they insufficiently account for plurality. It is perhaps not coincidental, for example, that Gregory, Taylor, and Pfau are all Roman Catholic. Why, furthermore, if the Middle Ages had such a superior account of personhood, did it frequently do such a miserable job of defending the personhood of those beyond Catholicism? And while it would be unfair to suggest (as some have) that Gregory aims to return civilization to the medieval arrangement, his choice to center his account around the unintended consequences of Protestantism have, not surprisingly, frustrated some readers sympathetic to his new narrative who happen to not be Catholic. Pfau is not immune to this criticism. Indeed, he condemns the 'anti-institutional, fideist hyper-Augustinianism of seventeenth century Puritanism, Jansensim, early eighteenth century German Pietism, and … evangelical and Pentecostal denominationalism of the early nineteenth century [SIC]' as all doomed by late medieval developments. Even if some Protestant conceptions of the will leave much to be desired, this remains a sloppy conflation within an otherwise supremely careful account."
Exordium: Modernity's Gaze
1–4: interpretation of Lorenzo Lotto's 16c Portrait of a Gentleman in his Study: it is twilight, the young man seems melancholic/inactive, & the book seems bereft of answers; one of Pfau's big claims is that theory & practice parted ways beginning with 14c nominalism & voluntarism; science often oversteps its bounds; young man's perplexity/amnesia re: ultimate ends
4–5: references to Gadder, MacIntyre, Dupré, Taylor & others
Part I. Prolegomena
- "The present is a text, and the past its interpretation" (John Henry Newman)
1: Frameworks or Tools? On the Status of Concepts in Humanistic Inquiry
9: this book is a study of "will" and "person" (which change drastically in European modernity), an "account of human agency," and "a study of our changed relationship to concepts"; 1) scope of will/person contracts, 2) internal coherence of will/person erodes, and 3) will/person is marginalized (forgotten)
10: modernity as "a condition of progressive conceptual amnesia"; humanities studies more and more seems "divorced from content"; Derrida and post-structuralism; rise of theory in the 1960s and the quest for method
11: "rhetorical reading"
12: knock against PowerPoint
13: "the humanities' prolonged bout of 'science envy'"; studiousness vs. curiosity (Griffiths)
14: Luther and Descartes as Augustine's modern descendants
15: affirmation of contingency and doubt (Aristotle and Augustine)—we participate in the logos, but we do not conquer knowledge; Ockham and voluntarism
15–17: Pfau's bad guys: Ockham, Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume; good guys are Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, More, Erasmus, Cambridge Platonists, Coleridge, Newman, Gadamer, MacIntyre, Dupré ("Platonic cum Christian model of human agency" sound like Niebuhr's Christ above Culture category)
18: the breakdown of the onto-theological conception of the logos is located at the Franciscan (Bonaventure, Duns Scotus) critique of Aquinas, although some may point to Luther's debate with Erasmus (16c); 17c tried to ground rights in nature (secular foundation); "nature as entelecheia" (purpose is intrinsic to form); participating in reason vs. producing rational order
19: Descartes and the new philosophy that seeks a method to encompass all areas of knowledge; Ockham is to blame
20: only efficient causes, not final ones
21: Gregory and the unintended Reformation; Hume's fact/value distinction
22–25: discussion of Heidegger and a "world picture" as something that only a modernist could conceive of
26: nominalism and contingency
27: Enlightenment changed the function of narrative from relation to the past to emancipation from the past; [some in our group thought that Pfau was too hard on Copernicus—the study of physics isn't necessarily void of final causes]
28: Nietzsche's description of a secular modernity that has "wiped away the entire horizon"
29: Descartes wanted to erase doubt
30: etymology of method (not hunting or sexual conquest, but a journey, even a pilgrimage, that transforms the traveler)
31: Husserl and the world's givenness; Gadamer and recognition; Newman's Grammar of Assent
32: issue of plagiarism (owning ideas)
33: storytelling; Pfau follows Anscombe, Murdoch, and MacIntyre—purpose is to critique modernity's understanding of concepts; understanding is always interpretation
34: only final causes (seeing something for what it could be) help us understand things
2: Forgetting by Remembering: Historicism and the Limits of Modern Knowledge
35: with modernity, narrative structure shifts from epic to utopian (overcoming the past, fear of error); "modern narrative unfolds as a utopian quest for a radically autonomous and entrepreneurial model of agency"
36–37: modern narrative sees events as "essentially unprecedented and singular, that is, a novum or, indeed, a 'novel'"; Freud's fort/da game; modernity sees the past "as strictly passé, as archival, fossilized ('sedimented'), and inert stuff"; etymology of modernus; modernity "establishes itself in contradistinction to antiquitas," "reject[ing] the notion of the distant past as a reservoir of exemplary meanings"; the words secular and epoch become more important in modernity
38: historicism and amnesia
39: bad guys again (Ockham, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Kant); concepts are viewed instrumentally
40: Pfau considers the cost of the modern loss of a certain view of ideas/concepts ("that they achieve meaning only within the long durée of time"; Weber, Arendt, Dupré, Taylor; secularization narratives; Pfau criticizes "Protestantism's insistence on a human-engineered, individualistic salvation" [no evidence provided]
41: Pfau argues from a Christian-Platonist tradition (against a naturalist-reductionist tradition); epiphanic time vs. linear time; mythical time (cyclical, recurrent, rhythmic)
42–43: Auerbach on late medieval time ("quotidian life punctured by moments of heightened spiritual significance"); Hobbes's model of time (one event follows another, and we can measure it) replaces the older model in the 17c; Walter Benjamin calls modern time "homogeneous" and "empty"
44: Newman: "the present is a text, and the past its interpretation"
45: "a flat-line model of time as pure durée"
46: Nietzsche's madman, Weber's "disenchantment of the world"
47: Charles Taylor on secularization, subtraction stories, fullness, and exclusive humanism; Protestant fideism (n17)
49: Taylor's metaphor of sedimentation; Faulkner's and Eliot's notion that the past is not the past [Wood made a clarifying point regarding Faulkner: the context of the quote is referring to the South]; modernity as a fragile achievement (Taylor)
50: stories of overcoming (struggle/emancipation; features of the quest romance, according to Frye): Luther, Galileo, Bacon, Bunyan, Defoe, Wordsworth, the 19c Bildungsroman; "modernity made disorientation its founding premise and enduring condition"; Pfau tries to show how he's distinct from Charles Taylor
51: modern time has more chronos than kairos (see n24)
52: "Hegel's philosophy shows how human flourishing and philosophical cognition have terminally parted company"; the modern fact/value distinction
3: "A large mental field": Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge after Newman
53: modern historicism is a "distancing technique" driven by the fear of the unknown and resistance to transcendence
55: Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine
57: Buckley: "Tradition is the contemporary presence of the past"; Descartes/Locke and the punctual self [Descartes's dualism in Discourse comes from his desire for humans to be "masters and possessors of nature"]
58: Pfau affirms Gregory's account of Protestantism and hyper-pluralism; Keats's "negative capability"
59: self-regarding relativism of Stanley Fish's "interpretive communities" (see Eagleton's review); narcissism and in-group narratives; Jameson's Postmoderinism
60: Protestantism's apparent lack of historical depth, continuity, tradition, community, etc.
62: Pius IX and "over-reaching foundationalism"; Nicholas Lash on Newman
63: "desynonymize progress from development"; "antecedent probability"
64: ideas run "the risk of corruption" when the world pushes back, but this risk is necessary; n16: modern notion of probability as calculable (Milbank)
65: "impressive accounts of modernity": Taylor, Milbank, Arendt, etc.; "the following argument seeks to capture the intrinsic idea of will and person through a series of forensic readings of representative arguments" ("close, textual analysis . . . has always been the bread and butter of literary studies"); Newman's purpose "to demonstrate how the flourishing of the human individuals pivots on their commitment in thought and action to the reality of a transcendent idea"
67: quote from Newman: "to be perfect is to have changed often" (Wood said that some Protestants have adopted this as a motto; I have never heard a Protestant say this; it sounds like a willful mischaracterization of Protestants); change like a tree, not like a cloud (Ruskin); Buckley: control as the advancement of wonder/puzzlement
68–69: nostalgia and longing
69: inquiry and tradition require a dialectical/agonistic approach (the debates of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas)
70: no triumphalistic view of intellectual history
71: the past "is continually being determined by our active (revolutionary) engagement with its legacy
72: Pfau doesn't like analytic philosophy; Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor on the loss of a moral conception
72–73: good guys and bad guys again
73–74: Hobbes and "passions"
74: Coleridge on the failure of modernism; human agency depends on interpersonal relationships
75: Buber and Levinas; no Luther, Kant, or Hegel; "Whatever its shortcomings (and they may be many), what follows seeks to argue a single, perhaps polemical thesis (rather than offering a detached scholarly survey): viz., that absent a sustained, comprehensive, and evolving critical engagement with the history of its key concepts of human agency (will, person, judgment, teleology), humanistic inquiry will not only find itself increasingly marginalized in the modern university, but will eventually discover itself to have been the principal agent of its own undoing"
Part II. Rational Appetite: An Emergent Conceptual Tradition
4: Beginnings: Desire, Judgment, and Action in Aristotle and the Stoics
5: Consolidation: St. Augustine on Choice, Sin, and the Divided Will
6: Rational Appetite and Good Sense: Will and Intellect in Aquinas
7: Rational Claims, Irrational Consequences: Ockham Disaggregates Will and Reason
Part III. Progressive Amnesia: Will and the Crisis of Reason
8: Impoverished Modernity: Will, Action, and Person in Hobbes's Leviathan
9: The Path toward Non-Cognitivism: Locke's Desire and Shaftesbury's Sentiment
10: From Naturalism to Reductionism: Mandeville's Passion and Hutcheson's Moral Sense
11: Mindless Desires and Contentless Minds: Hume's Enigma of Reason
12: Virtue without Agency: Sentiment, Behavior, and Habituation in A. Smith
13: After Sentimentalism: Liberalism and the Discontents of Modern Autonomy
Part IV. Retrieving the Human: Coleridge on Will, Person, and Conscience
14: Good or Commodity? Modern Knowledge and the Loss of Eudaimonia
15: The Persistence of Gnosis: Freedom and "Error" in Philosophical Modernity
16: Beyond Voluntarism and Deontology: Coleridge's Notion of the Responsible Will
17: Existence before Substance: The Idea of "Person" in Humanistic Inquiry
18: Existence as Reality and Act: Person, Relationally, and Incommunicability
19: "Consciousness has the appearance of another": On Relationally as Love
20: "Faith is fidelity . . . the the conscience": Coleridge's Ontology
I stopped attending the reading group when they started meeting the second semester (Jan. 11, 2017).
From what I have read, it looks like another Catholic rebuke of Protestantism as the fountainhead of Modernity (see Taylor's A Secular Age, Carroll's Protestant Modernity [which I haven't read], and Gregory's The Unintended Reformation). See links in my review of Gregory's The Unintended Reformation.
From Matthew Milliner's review at Books & Culture: "[T]here is a . . . serious concern with grand narratives that I am describing, namely that they insufficiently account for plurality. It is perhaps not coincidental, for example, that Gregory, Taylor, and Pfau are all Roman Catholic. Why, furthermore, if the Middle Ages had such a superior account of personhood, did it frequently do such a miserable job of defending the personhood of those beyond Catholicism? And while it would be unfair to suggest (as some have) that Gregory aims to return civilization to the medieval arrangement, his choice to center his account around the unintended consequences of Protestantism have, not surprisingly, frustrated some readers sympathetic to his new narrative who happen to not be Catholic. Pfau is not immune to this criticism. Indeed, he condemns the 'anti-institutional, fideist hyper-Augustinianism of seventeenth century Puritanism, Jansensim, early eighteenth century German Pietism, and … evangelical and Pentecostal denominationalism of the early nineteenth century [SIC]' as all doomed by late medieval developments. Even if some Protestant conceptions of the will leave much to be desired, this remains a sloppy conflation within an otherwise supremely careful account."
Exordium: Modernity's Gaze
1–4: interpretation of Lorenzo Lotto's 16c Portrait of a Gentleman in his Study: it is twilight, the young man seems melancholic/inactive, & the book seems bereft of answers; one of Pfau's big claims is that theory & practice parted ways beginning with 14c nominalism & voluntarism; science often oversteps its bounds; young man's perplexity/amnesia re: ultimate ends
4–5: references to Gadder, MacIntyre, Dupré, Taylor & others
Part I. Prolegomena
- "The present is a text, and the past its interpretation" (John Henry Newman)
1: Frameworks or Tools? On the Status of Concepts in Humanistic Inquiry
9: this book is a study of "will" and "person" (which change drastically in European modernity), an "account of human agency," and "a study of our changed relationship to concepts"; 1) scope of will/person contracts, 2) internal coherence of will/person erodes, and 3) will/person is marginalized (forgotten)
10: modernity as "a condition of progressive conceptual amnesia"; humanities studies more and more seems "divorced from content"; Derrida and post-structuralism; rise of theory in the 1960s and the quest for method
11: "rhetorical reading"
12: knock against PowerPoint
13: "the humanities' prolonged bout of 'science envy'"; studiousness vs. curiosity (Griffiths)
14: Luther and Descartes as Augustine's modern descendants
15: affirmation of contingency and doubt (Aristotle and Augustine)—we participate in the logos, but we do not conquer knowledge; Ockham and voluntarism
15–17: Pfau's bad guys: Ockham, Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume; good guys are Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, More, Erasmus, Cambridge Platonists, Coleridge, Newman, Gadamer, MacIntyre, Dupré ("Platonic cum Christian model of human agency" sound like Niebuhr's Christ above Culture category)
18: the breakdown of the onto-theological conception of the logos is located at the Franciscan (Bonaventure, Duns Scotus) critique of Aquinas, although some may point to Luther's debate with Erasmus (16c); 17c tried to ground rights in nature (secular foundation); "nature as entelecheia" (purpose is intrinsic to form); participating in reason vs. producing rational order
19: Descartes and the new philosophy that seeks a method to encompass all areas of knowledge; Ockham is to blame
20: only efficient causes, not final ones
21: Gregory and the unintended Reformation; Hume's fact/value distinction
22–25: discussion of Heidegger and a "world picture" as something that only a modernist could conceive of
26: nominalism and contingency
27: Enlightenment changed the function of narrative from relation to the past to emancipation from the past; [some in our group thought that Pfau was too hard on Copernicus—the study of physics isn't necessarily void of final causes]
28: Nietzsche's description of a secular modernity that has "wiped away the entire horizon"
29: Descartes wanted to erase doubt
30: etymology of method (not hunting or sexual conquest, but a journey, even a pilgrimage, that transforms the traveler)
31: Husserl and the world's givenness; Gadamer and recognition; Newman's Grammar of Assent
32: issue of plagiarism (owning ideas)
33: storytelling; Pfau follows Anscombe, Murdoch, and MacIntyre—purpose is to critique modernity's understanding of concepts; understanding is always interpretation
34: only final causes (seeing something for what it could be) help us understand things
2: Forgetting by Remembering: Historicism and the Limits of Modern Knowledge
35: with modernity, narrative structure shifts from epic to utopian (overcoming the past, fear of error); "modern narrative unfolds as a utopian quest for a radically autonomous and entrepreneurial model of agency"
36–37: modern narrative sees events as "essentially unprecedented and singular, that is, a novum or, indeed, a 'novel'"; Freud's fort/da game; modernity sees the past "as strictly passé, as archival, fossilized ('sedimented'), and inert stuff"; etymology of modernus; modernity "establishes itself in contradistinction to antiquitas," "reject[ing] the notion of the distant past as a reservoir of exemplary meanings"; the words secular and epoch become more important in modernity
38: historicism and amnesia
39: bad guys again (Ockham, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Kant); concepts are viewed instrumentally
40: Pfau considers the cost of the modern loss of a certain view of ideas/concepts ("that they achieve meaning only within the long durée of time"; Weber, Arendt, Dupré, Taylor; secularization narratives; Pfau criticizes "Protestantism's insistence on a human-engineered, individualistic salvation" [no evidence provided]
41: Pfau argues from a Christian-Platonist tradition (against a naturalist-reductionist tradition); epiphanic time vs. linear time; mythical time (cyclical, recurrent, rhythmic)
42–43: Auerbach on late medieval time ("quotidian life punctured by moments of heightened spiritual significance"); Hobbes's model of time (one event follows another, and we can measure it) replaces the older model in the 17c; Walter Benjamin calls modern time "homogeneous" and "empty"
44: Newman: "the present is a text, and the past its interpretation"
45: "a flat-line model of time as pure durée"
46: Nietzsche's madman, Weber's "disenchantment of the world"
47: Charles Taylor on secularization, subtraction stories, fullness, and exclusive humanism; Protestant fideism (n17)
49: Taylor's metaphor of sedimentation; Faulkner's and Eliot's notion that the past is not the past [Wood made a clarifying point regarding Faulkner: the context of the quote is referring to the South]; modernity as a fragile achievement (Taylor)
50: stories of overcoming (struggle/emancipation; features of the quest romance, according to Frye): Luther, Galileo, Bacon, Bunyan, Defoe, Wordsworth, the 19c Bildungsroman; "modernity made disorientation its founding premise and enduring condition"; Pfau tries to show how he's distinct from Charles Taylor
51: modern time has more chronos than kairos (see n24)
52: "Hegel's philosophy shows how human flourishing and philosophical cognition have terminally parted company"; the modern fact/value distinction
3: "A large mental field": Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge after Newman
53: modern historicism is a "distancing technique" driven by the fear of the unknown and resistance to transcendence
55: Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine
57: Buckley: "Tradition is the contemporary presence of the past"; Descartes/Locke and the punctual self [Descartes's dualism in Discourse comes from his desire for humans to be "masters and possessors of nature"]
58: Pfau affirms Gregory's account of Protestantism and hyper-pluralism; Keats's "negative capability"
59: self-regarding relativism of Stanley Fish's "interpretive communities" (see Eagleton's review); narcissism and in-group narratives; Jameson's Postmoderinism
60: Protestantism's apparent lack of historical depth, continuity, tradition, community, etc.
62: Pius IX and "over-reaching foundationalism"; Nicholas Lash on Newman
63: "desynonymize progress from development"; "antecedent probability"
64: ideas run "the risk of corruption" when the world pushes back, but this risk is necessary; n16: modern notion of probability as calculable (Milbank)
65: "impressive accounts of modernity": Taylor, Milbank, Arendt, etc.; "the following argument seeks to capture the intrinsic idea of will and person through a series of forensic readings of representative arguments" ("close, textual analysis . . . has always been the bread and butter of literary studies"); Newman's purpose "to demonstrate how the flourishing of the human individuals pivots on their commitment in thought and action to the reality of a transcendent idea"
67: quote from Newman: "to be perfect is to have changed often" (Wood said that some Protestants have adopted this as a motto; I have never heard a Protestant say this; it sounds like a willful mischaracterization of Protestants); change like a tree, not like a cloud (Ruskin); Buckley: control as the advancement of wonder/puzzlement
68–69: nostalgia and longing
69: inquiry and tradition require a dialectical/agonistic approach (the debates of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas)
70: no triumphalistic view of intellectual history
71: the past "is continually being determined by our active (revolutionary) engagement with its legacy
72: Pfau doesn't like analytic philosophy; Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor on the loss of a moral conception
72–73: good guys and bad guys again
73–74: Hobbes and "passions"
74: Coleridge on the failure of modernism; human agency depends on interpersonal relationships
75: Buber and Levinas; no Luther, Kant, or Hegel; "Whatever its shortcomings (and they may be many), what follows seeks to argue a single, perhaps polemical thesis (rather than offering a detached scholarly survey): viz., that absent a sustained, comprehensive, and evolving critical engagement with the history of its key concepts of human agency (will, person, judgment, teleology), humanistic inquiry will not only find itself increasingly marginalized in the modern university, but will eventually discover itself to have been the principal agent of its own undoing"
Part II. Rational Appetite: An Emergent Conceptual Tradition
4: Beginnings: Desire, Judgment, and Action in Aristotle and the Stoics
5: Consolidation: St. Augustine on Choice, Sin, and the Divided Will
6: Rational Appetite and Good Sense: Will and Intellect in Aquinas
7: Rational Claims, Irrational Consequences: Ockham Disaggregates Will and Reason
Part III. Progressive Amnesia: Will and the Crisis of Reason
8: Impoverished Modernity: Will, Action, and Person in Hobbes's Leviathan
9: The Path toward Non-Cognitivism: Locke's Desire and Shaftesbury's Sentiment
10: From Naturalism to Reductionism: Mandeville's Passion and Hutcheson's Moral Sense
11: Mindless Desires and Contentless Minds: Hume's Enigma of Reason
12: Virtue without Agency: Sentiment, Behavior, and Habituation in A. Smith
13: After Sentimentalism: Liberalism and the Discontents of Modern Autonomy
Part IV. Retrieving the Human: Coleridge on Will, Person, and Conscience
14: Good or Commodity? Modern Knowledge and the Loss of Eudaimonia
15: The Persistence of Gnosis: Freedom and "Error" in Philosophical Modernity
16: Beyond Voluntarism and Deontology: Coleridge's Notion of the Responsible Will
17: Existence before Substance: The Idea of "Person" in Humanistic Inquiry
18: Existence as Reality and Act: Person, Relationally, and Incommunicability
19: "Consciousness has the appearance of another": On Relationally as Love
20: "Faith is fidelity . . . the the conscience": Coleridge's Ontology
December 11, 2025
wow. so good. look idc who u are, pfau has read more then you and he’s smarter then you. it’s not like pfau writes complexly or is trying to confuse you, he’s a very clear writer. but he’ll throw a sentence out like “reacting against both englightenment rationalism and its variously idealist and pessimistic counterpoints (friedrich heinrich jacobi’s anti-rationalism; humes skepticism; schelling’s pantheism, etc,) the late (christian platonist) coleridge here seeks to reclaim an alternative model of reason.” like sure pfau i was just thinking the same thing about ol’ jacobi and his anti-rationalism.
so a lot of times while reading this ur kinda just like in the backseat driving through some foreign land where pfau is driving trying to explain the what we’re seeing. maybe in 10 years or so ill be in the passenger seat. there were a chapter or two where i was in the trunk kind of hearing murmurs.
for the bulk of the book, each chapter takes an important thinker and its kind of like the best summary/critique of said thinker you’ll find. some other chapters moreso take up themes. but taken all together the book gives an incredible account of the person and how it’s become impoverished. a difficult but necessary read for a foucault fan-boy such as myself
so a lot of times while reading this ur kinda just like in the backseat driving through some foreign land where pfau is driving trying to explain the what we’re seeing. maybe in 10 years or so ill be in the passenger seat. there were a chapter or two where i was in the trunk kind of hearing murmurs.
for the bulk of the book, each chapter takes an important thinker and its kind of like the best summary/critique of said thinker you’ll find. some other chapters moreso take up themes. but taken all together the book gives an incredible account of the person and how it’s become impoverished. a difficult but necessary read for a foucault fan-boy such as myself
March 21, 2016
If you want to ask the big questions, you're going to have to read the big books. At least, that's what I kept telling myself as I measured my progress through this book after a week of reading only to find that I was 10% done. Pfau is a professor of English, but I think that were this written a century ago, it would have been classified as philology. The focus is indeed on words (or, more precisely, the concepts behind the words): will, person, teleology, and purpose are traced through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Hobbes, Locke, Smith, etc. up through the time of the Romantics (with appropriate flash-forwards to the debates about these terms in the modern day). Considering the ground that Pfau covers, this huge book actually seems quite short, and I actually found its level of detail to be just about perfect to cover the evolution of the concept of what is a person.
For all that, much of the book seems to come down to what thinkers thought of as the strength and utility of one of the biggest of little words: the "logos." What is the nature of the structure "outside" us, and how does it relate to the structure "inside" us? Is the universe ultimately about material or about relationship? It is something to dominate or something to receive as a gift?
I found it fascinating and well worth the effort to read something this far outside of my discipline. I've found that I come down on the side that we can participate in the logos by telling stories, and that those stories aren't just constructed and contingent, but are in fact true.
The last fourth of the book turns its focus to Coleridge as a thinker whose ideas may offer a way out of the materialist cul-de-sac we seem to be trapped in as the default philosophy of the century. I've run into Coleridge before and, I agree, his philosophy of starting with the "responsible will" inside rather than the material outside does seem to be a way forward. My only complaint is that I would have liked more about Coleridge's thinking, because as it stands I have to do a lot more reading on my own to figure out how to go forward in my field following Coleridge's example. The good news is I'm colleagues with a Coleridge expert, so the fact that I work at a liberal arts university and have friends like that is a big help moving forward. But if I had my wishes, this book would have split off and expanded the third part (the one about Coleridge), because I want to know so much more. Even the third part didn't have quite enough about Coleridge, because it frequently talked about other thinkers like Schopenhauer for pages on end, when I more wanted to get away from the negative examples and toward the positive ones.
This fits with Barfield (and less obviously with Deacon), and provides a valuable intellectual scaffold for moving forward with Coleridge's thinking as we head into the 21st century. Well, well worth the read, even for a scientist like myself.
For all that, much of the book seems to come down to what thinkers thought of as the strength and utility of one of the biggest of little words: the "logos." What is the nature of the structure "outside" us, and how does it relate to the structure "inside" us? Is the universe ultimately about material or about relationship? It is something to dominate or something to receive as a gift?
I found it fascinating and well worth the effort to read something this far outside of my discipline. I've found that I come down on the side that we can participate in the logos by telling stories, and that those stories aren't just constructed and contingent, but are in fact true.
The last fourth of the book turns its focus to Coleridge as a thinker whose ideas may offer a way out of the materialist cul-de-sac we seem to be trapped in as the default philosophy of the century. I've run into Coleridge before and, I agree, his philosophy of starting with the "responsible will" inside rather than the material outside does seem to be a way forward. My only complaint is that I would have liked more about Coleridge's thinking, because as it stands I have to do a lot more reading on my own to figure out how to go forward in my field following Coleridge's example. The good news is I'm colleagues with a Coleridge expert, so the fact that I work at a liberal arts university and have friends like that is a big help moving forward. But if I had my wishes, this book would have split off and expanded the third part (the one about Coleridge), because I want to know so much more. Even the third part didn't have quite enough about Coleridge, because it frequently talked about other thinkers like Schopenhauer for pages on end, when I more wanted to get away from the negative examples and toward the positive ones.
This fits with Barfield (and less obviously with Deacon), and provides a valuable intellectual scaffold for moving forward with Coleridge's thinking as we head into the 21st century. Well, well worth the read, even for a scientist like myself.
January 6, 2023
This book is long, complicated and very rewarding. It helped me understand the spirit and focus of the modern era.
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