The Importance of Imagination, Part 2
Read Part 1.
Premodernity and the Moral Imagination
Everyone constructs a map of the world, a mental image or inner picture of the way things are. This map serves as a reference point for each person who is attempting to navigate the world. It is what an individual regards as “the truth,” i.e., the overall explanation that locates a specific fact in its proper relationship to every other fact.
Western intellectual history can be envisioned as a series of attempts to explain how this map is put together and what it refers to. Each of these attempts is what Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences called a “metaphysical dream.” The history of Western thought has been dominated by three successive metaphysical dreams, each of which lends itself to a particular species of imagination.
The first metaphysical dream is premodern. Varieties of it were held by classical philosophers and by Christian theologians. The premodern metaphysical dream defined reality in three ways.
First, reality was assumed to be ordered. Everything within immanent reality (the reality that is apparent to our senses) was connected to everything else so that the entire system constituted a universe. The universe operated according to consistent principles. It was understood to be a cohesive whole. Because premoderns believed in an ordered universe, they also believed that explanations of the various connections were available. In other words, they believed that it was possible to entertain a map or image of the world as it really existed.
Second, reality was thought to be transcendent. According to this notion, immanent reality was patterned after some greater reality that exists above and beyond our ability to perceive. For Plato, ultimate reality consisted in the ideas. For Christian theologians, God thought the world before He made it.
Third, reality was considered to be moral. The universe was believed to include, not only sensible realities such as rocks or stars or plants, but also moral realities such as courage and freedom and justice. Fundamental to the moral universe was the distinction between right and wrong. This distinction and its applications were considered to be an aspect of the Creator’s original design that had been worked into the created order itself. Premodern people looked upon moral law as an order that was every bit as real as the laws of nature. Indeed, morality was an aspect of nature, and serious damage was sure to follow disregard for the moral order.
Premoderns explicitly recognized the necessity of an inner map or image of the world. To them, immanent reality was neither self-explanatory nor ultimate. It was a copy of something greater and higher, of something that existed outside of the universe entirely. In order to understand the world, premodern people knew that they had to start with something that came from outside. For Christians, that something was revelation.
For premoderns, and especially for Christians, the way to know the world was not mainly to look at the world itself, for it was a secondary reality. The way to know the world was to look at the primary reality after which the world had been copied. That primary reality existed in the mind of God. The best way of knowing and understanding the world was to know and love God. Of course, no one believed that revelation would provide every detail of knowledge about the world, but revelation did communicate the overall map or grid within which every particular had to fit.
Remember the illustration with which our discussion began last week? You were alone in the car trying to navigate an unknown and unfamiliar city through a blizzard. According to the premodern metaphysical dream, revelation provides a sort of GPS within the car. It constantly shows the overall grid of the city (in varying degrees of detail), and it constantly displays the position of the car. With revelation, you can always know where you are and where you are going.
For the premodern, therefore, humans were not merely positioned within the city. They also had the capacity to look up and out of the city toward something transcendent. Of course, constructing the inner map was still an exercise of the imagination, but it was an exercise that was informed by an infallible source of truth. In fact, the mind of God alone could comprehend the truly exhaustive explanation that included all the facts and rendered them in their proper relationships to one another. This exhaustive explanation was not merely truth. It was The Truth.
This capacity to look upwards to The Truth was what Edmund Burke called the “moral imagination.” To employ the moral imagination is to envision the world as it is meant to be, as it is revealed to be and, therefore, as it really is. The moral imagination creates within the perceiving individual an image of reality as ordered, transcendent, and moral. For the premodern exercising moral imagination, “The Truth is up there.”
One more thing. For the premodern, The Truth is something that has to be given from outside. This necessarily places belief prior to knowledge. The premodern metaphysical dream emphasizes the primacy of faith. Faith that trusts the proper object is absolutely essential to any true knowledge of the world. Anselm aptly summarized the perspective of premodernity: “I believe in order that I might understand.”
The Holy Scriptures. II.
George Herbert (1593-1633)
Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glory!
Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the story.
This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:
Then as dispersed herbs do match a potion,
These three make up some Christians’ destiny.
Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,
And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing
Thy words do find me out, and parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.
Stars are poor books, and oftentimes do miss
This book of stars lights to eternal bliss.
This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
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I knew I was not post-modern in my outlook, but was not sure how pre-modern I was.
Looks like pretty pre-modern, after all.
(FWIW, even premoderns were not big fans of the non sequitur … speaking of—found this on Wikipedia and had to share)
Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fish.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
That said, I take it that someone radically misunderstands the situation of the modern world or, if you prefer, modernity if they think there is an straighforward or grand sense in which we can return to premodernity. That is simply not possible, and such a view is often rooted in a failure genuinely to understand and to appreciate distinctive, irreversible contributions of modernity, both positive and negative.
A kind of intellectualism, by which I mean an overemphasis on ideas without adequate sensitivity to the historical and social conditions and practices in which they are embedded, through which they are lived, and in light of which they derived their plausibility and legitimacy, is particularly prone to the error of not understanding and appreciating how modernity has decisively changed the world in which we live and did so in certain irreversible ways. This is a huge issue, however, and I don’t think American conservatives have ever seriously dealth with it, certainly not at the level of institutions or movements (e.g. this is why, in the opinion of myself and many others, evangelical theology is largely boring, adding very little to the questions that distinctively concern people who have appreciated the distinctive challenges posed by modernity. Much of it is contributions to provincial - not necessarily a bad thing - or moribund debates, and often at a rather shoddy level of quality, if one starts comparing them with major theologians in different, contemporaneous tradition.) Why this is the case is itself a rather complicated story, having a lot to do with a story well-known to historians: the differences between the way America and Western Europe modernized and experienced the Enlightenment.
I don’t accuse Bauder of the error of intellectualism (as I defined it above), although I am suspicious about his writing on this issue because of its reliance on Weaver, who I think does commmit this error.
Nevertheless, I repeat my original statement of gratitude for his raising the issue, and I know it’s impossible to adequately address the issues I raised (and many others) in short essays. What Bauder is doing here is invaluable, in part because it raises the level of discourse and sets a higher bar than conservatives are used to. So much of education is just giving people categories and concepts that they actually internalize; debate and disagreement can follow, but it’s only substantive and profitable if it actually builds on a serious foundation.
It’s not hard to find problems w/premoderns, after all. Sinners just like us.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
As modernity was born and progressed, their came to be a more radical separation between the physical and non-physical worlds, such that the idea of kosmos gave way to the physical universe. Many concepts were downgraded from being real (Thomist) to being simply organizational concepts constructed within the human mind (Ockhamist school). With the rise of Newtonian physics, efficient causality replaced teleological causality as the most important form of knowledge; the epitome of this approach would perhaps by Laplace, with his example of the omniscient daemon (see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge for a refutation of Laplace). Moral law, running off the inertia of its Christian foundation, continued to play a role in the Enlightenment, but Montesquieu’s De L’Esprit des Lois put a chink in the system, and I think by hedonistic utilitarianism people were realizing that the various recent attempts at rational ethics were failing. Since man no longer saw himself as a creature possessing a unique telos and living in a rational kosmos, ethics and everything else non-physical was relegated to the subjective (see Alisdair McIntyre, After Virtue).
All that having been said, I concur with Joseph that few, if any, of the writers that I’ve read who make cases against modernity have done so while simultaneously exploring the gains of modernity. Of course, I don’t expect them to do so in the same volume, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere. Then again, I’m only peripherally acquainted with the literature on modernity, and it’s quite possible I just haven’t run into it so far. As it stands right now, I see modernity as (in some ways at least) as bad, post-modernity as not discernibly better, and pre-modernity as impossible to return to and riddled with its own problems. Perhaps we will find our way through to a sort of Christian post-modernity. At the very least, I hope we figure out some more helpful labels. Calling something post-X or pre-X isn’t very descriptive and seems biased toward the label without the prefix.
P.S. One more major feature of modernity, which I haven’t really figured out how to integrate with the others, is the notion of autonomy, or individual freedom. This is, I think, an aspect of modernity that recurs very strongly in post-modernism. A wholesale return to pre-modern thinking would require an adjustment of our concept of the individual that I doubt many Christians would embrace.
My Blog: http://dearreaderblog.com
Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. ~ John Calvin
We’re not talking about the same thing, apparently. The sense in which I intend “modernity,” which is roughly congruous with the way it and synomous terms are used in contemporary social science, is not the sort of thing about which one can meaningfully say, “I reject modernity.” One could say, “I am hostile to aspects of modernity, etc.” But saying “I have rejected modernity” in the sense in which I use the term is simply nonsense. One cannot, for example, simply reject by fiat the Enlightenment and the concrete institutions it produced and influenced, the industrial revolution, the rise of historical consciousness, nation states, nationalism, capitalistic economies, human rights, transnational corporations and a globalized economic and communication systems, transnational political instituions (e.g. the E.U, the U.N) and a host of other things that both express and shape the cultural, political, and economic situation into which we are born and over which we have extraordinariliy little direct control. Only if by “modernity” one means some relatively narrow set of ideas completely abstracted from any concrete conditions could one reject modernity the same way one rejects a political position that one dislikes.
Charlie,
Yes, Dupre is helpful, as are some of the other people I gather influenced your post (Gunton, et al). Taylor’s A Secular Age is by no means a place to dive into; but it’s a very important book to read (ideally after Sources of the Self) after one has a solid grasp of the literature on modernity and secularization. I read Taylor’s book in a sociology seminar on secularization in which we read about 10-14 books. I have the syllabus somewhere if you are interested.
A lot of people in the social sciences write about the positive gains of modernity; intellectuals historians/historians of philosophy like Dupre, especially those, like him, who adopt the “Nominalism ruined everything” narrative (a narrative that Heiko Oberman, for example, strongly rejects) tend to downplay the positive feature of modernity in large part because they do not interact with the historical and social-scientific literature that has done most of the important theoretical and concrete work on modernity. I am, myself, sympathetic to the evil nominalism narrative, although I’ve become more critical of it over the past year.
Re: P.S. On autonomy: if you’re interested, I’ve actually written a good deal on that (it’s one of my academic interests), some of which is strictly philosophical and rather technical that is being published in an article, some of which is also philosophical but geared towards a broader, social-scientific perspective. The paper I wrote for the sociology seminar I mentioned is about the origins of autonomy and its relationship to modernity. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to find it and send you a copy. If nothing else, I refer to a lot of good literature on the topic and the Prof. thought it was a good paper.
On autonomy, particularly its history, I’ll be happy to read anything you send me.
My Blog: http://dearreaderblog.com
Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. ~ John Calvin
[Charlie] All that having been said, I concur with Joseph that few, if any, of the writers that I’ve read who make cases against modernity have done so while simultaneously exploring the gains of modernity. Of course, I don’t expect them to do so in the same volume, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere. Then again, I’m only peripherally acquainted with the literature on modernity, and it’s quite possible I just haven’t run into it so far. As it stands right now, I see modernity as (in some ways at least) as bad, post-modernity as not discernibly better, and pre-modernity as impossible to return to and riddled with its own problems. Perhaps we will find our way through to a sort of Christian post-modernity. At the very least, I hope we figure out some more helpful labels. Calling something post-X or pre-X isn’t very descriptive and seems biased toward the label without the prefix.I appreciate your thoughts here and pretty much agree.
We know each “age” is going to cast stones at the one before it and be at least occasionally correct. But we can only do the best we can with the age we are in, knowing that what we come up with still be flawed and future generations (if there are any) will expose the flaws.
[Charlie]There’s more than one debate there. One would be whether a wholesale return to pre-modern thinking about individual autonomy is possible, the other would be whether it would be wise. For many the latter is already assumed, so they tsk tsk about the good old days.
P.S. One more major feature of modernity, which I haven’t really figured out how to integrate with the others, is the notion of autonomy, or individual freedom. This is, I think, an aspect of modernity that recurs very strongly in post-modernism. A wholesale return to pre-modern thinking would require an adjustment of our concept of the individual that I doubt many Christians would embrace.
But there’s a third debate also: was there really a single pre-modern view of individual autonomy and was it really different from the modern one in same ways many assert?
Couldn’t cite them now, but I’ve read some broad claims about pre-modern thought on the subject that seemed very unlikely to accurately describe how people thought from the dawn of creation. So maybe “pre modern” would be better as simply “medieval” or “classical” or something, to avoid suggesting there was nothing important before it.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]I think you have a point here, in that pre-modern does seem to be a sweeping term, covering from creation (or proto-hominids, depending on the perspective) through the 1500s, including Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, Catholics, Chinese, Egypians, Muslims. Obviously, there are a lot of differences of perspective there. However, I am convinced, and so are just about all the social historians, that the differences between modernity and pre-modernity far outweigh the differences among various pre-modern views. It’s important to realize that modernity didn’t hit the whole world all at the same time. Westerners were able to observe the process of modernization with something of a headstart when the West opened up Japan in the 1800s. Japan went through, and I suppose may still be going through, a time-compressed version of what the West went through more gradually. There is a staggering amount of cultural commentary on the opening of the East, but I think it’s safe to say that those who embraced modernity early in the process suddenly found themselves having substantially more in common with Westerners than with their own ethnic kinsmen who were anti-modernist. The anti-modernists reciprocated the feeling.
But there’s a third debate also: was there really a single pre-modern view of individual autonomy and was it really different from the modern one in same ways many assert?
Couldn’t cite them now, but I’ve read some broad claims about pre-modern thought on the subject that seemed very unlikely to accurately describe how people thought from the dawn of creation. So maybe “pre modern” would be better as simply “medieval” or “classical” or something, to avoid suggesting there was nothing important before it.
In terms of individuality, I think that we need to discriminate between “person” and “human being.” To modern and post-modern Americans, these are very nearly co-extensive concepts. Many Americans believe that simply because a human is born (and sadly, not until he or she is born), he has a number of intrinsic rights that people ought not to transgress. By far the majority view is that all people are equal, or have equal potential, or ought to be allowed equal opportunity to develop potential. Contrast that with Aristotle, who believed that some people were slaves because they were slaves by nature (κατα φυσιν, I believe). The Greeks assumed that the non-Greeks were uncivilized and generally incapable of being civilized. Barbarians were humans, but not persons in any meaningful sense. The Romans, before 1st century AD, didn’t even give women names. The only legal name a woman had was her clan name; doubtless they came up with pet names for each woman so they could differentiate them, but none of those names had any official legal standing (see Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin). Also, when a child was born, the father had the legal option of allowing it to die in the woods outside town (like Oedipus Rex). So, women and children, at that point, were not persons. Personhood is not a physical quality; it is a status bestowed by society.
Regarding autonomy, I think it’s clear that during modernity the notion of a person as an “autonomous will” really came to the fore. Definitely the idea of a person existing without or irrespective of environment seems to make its appearance here. Kant stresses people as “wills” and by Nietzsche, all of life is nothing but “the will to power.” I think Colin Gunton, in The One, The Three, and The Many, did a great job critiquing the modern concept of autonomy and will. In fact, I think he didn’t go far enough.
My Blog: http://dearreaderblog.com
Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. ~ John Calvin
[Charlie] In terms of individuality, I think that we need to discriminate between “person” and “human being.” To modern and post-modern Americans, these are very nearly co-extensive concepts. Many Americans believe that simply because a human is born (and sadly, not until he or she is born), he has a number of intrinsic rights that people ought not to transgress. By far the majority view is that all people are equal, or have equal potential, or ought to be allowed equal opportunity to develop potential. Contrast that with Aristotle, who believed that some people were slaves because they were slaves by nature (κατα φυσιν, I believe). The Greeks assumed that the non-Greeks were uncivilized and generally incapable of being civilized. Barbarians were humans, but not persons in any meaningful sense. The Romans, before 1st century AD, didn’t even give women names. The only legal name a woman had was her clan name; doubtless they came up with pet names for each woman so they could differentiate them, but none of those names had any official legal standing (see Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin). Also, when a child was born, the father had the legal option of allowing it to die in the woods outside town (like Oedipus Rex). So, women and children, at that point, were not persons. Personhood is not a physical quality; it is a status bestowed by society.Very interesting. Does this tie into your doctoral work or have you just been reading up on it for fun? (Yes… I have left out several other possibilities!)
But I’m curious as to how much the pre-modern view of personhood-vs.-humanity you’ve described would be a good thing to return to?
Clearly the autonomy and will to power stuff you regard to be a problem in modernity but what about assigning personhood to all human beings? I’m inclined to think we figured something out there.
But that raises an interesting point in connection with questions I was referring to earlier. When I look at the apparently recognized personhood of women and children in the Bible, it appears to resemble the modern view more than the premodern view you have described. Which would seem to not fit your thesis on that particular point. Was it unusual that Laban named both of his daughters, even the “ugly” one? Why do we know the names of Abraham’s slaves? The Bible is full of people naming their infants moments after they were born.
We know this was not common practice in the middle ages (or so it seems anyway), but I’m having a hard time buying the idea that people viewing women, children and slaves as nonpersons is The Premodern View when the Bible seems to offer so much evidence to the contrary.
(And I have made this observation with reference to the allegedly premodern view of common sense in the past as well… arguably, I’m reading modernity back into the Bible to some degree in the cases of common sense I think I see, but that’s clearly not the case where naming of women, children, infants, concubines etc. occurs as evidence of recognized personhood)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[RPittman] Joseph, my biggest argument, though, is that you are limiting my choices. You are telling me that I cannot reject Modernity. I can.No, I don’t really think you can. I mean you can reject aspects of modernity you do not believe in—we all do that here—but I think part of what Joseph is saying that people in any era cannot fully recognize what is unique in the mindset of their times. So, to the degree we can recognize modernity in ourselves we can almost reject it. But not to the degree we are not even aware of it.
And I think even some of what we recognize, we are unable to shake off because we do not know how to think any other way.
But I’m not sure I want to reject all of it anyway. I don’t by the philosophy that says we’re automatically making progress by some kind of thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic, but I can think of no reason that the mindset (I don’t know what the more precise term would be… zeitgeist?) of one era couldn’t be messed up enough that the one that follows it improves on it in some important ways.
“Outgrowing” some ways of thinking from medieval times would be an example.
Though I’m inclined to think what’s identifiably good in modernity is really just pre-premodern stuff that has come back again (though in the case of modernity, it comes back by a different route than before).
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
So, you are saying that one can’t change the paradigm of his thinking from that of his culture. This sounds a lot like determinism. I don’t buy it. Are we communicating with one another? I wonder.No not communicating.
What I said… “you can reject aspects of modernity you do not believe in—we all do that here”
It’s not a “reject the paradigm 100%” or “embrace the paradigm 100%” scenario. What we all do (I hope!) is reject what ought to be rejected and retain what ought to be retained (though imperfectly, to be sure). One reason for this is that there has never yet been a “paradigm” utterly devoid of truth. It’s going to get a few things right. Some far fewer than others!
[RP] Pre-modern thought has to be modified to deal with scientific methodology.That would be adopting a chunk of the modernity paradigm… and more than a mere “detail.”
How do you know? The homology argument has never been shown to necessarily indicate relationship.I don’t think I was making a “homology argument.”
My suggestion there was that what’s worth retaining in modernity is not really modern at all, but is evident in far older settings. For example, aspects of the modern view of personhood that I referred to in my response to Charlie above. It’s clear that ancient Hebrews, for example, attached personhood more generously to human beings than medievals did.
The definition of modernity you referred to there is not very good, IMO… or at least not very complete. Focuses on results far more than the underlying way of thinking. But even working w/that definition, are you opposed to a person starting a business, recruiting investors, sharing the profits of the business with the investors and growing the business as much as is ethically possible?
By the definition you mentioned, that would be a key component to modernity—capitalism. I embrace that one without hesitation (again, believing that this not a modern idea at all, only the scale and structure of it is ‘new’).
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Discussion