Personhood Essay Research Paper But what of

Personhood Essay, Research Paper

But what of those who, out of mischief or piety, wish to deny the power of liberalism’s fundamental premise. And those free spirits who wish honestly to resist liberalism’s claims to authority. What can be said on behalf of liberalism’s fundamental premise to them. Can reason defend freedom and equality as the political principles most appropriate to the dignity shared by all human beings.

Alain Renaut thinks that reason is up to the task. Renaut, the co- author with Luc Ferry of French Philosophy of the Sixties and Heidegger and Modernity, is one of an influential group of French intellectuals who, in response to the excesses of existentialism, Marxism, and poststructuralism that marked the post-war intellectual life of Paris, have sought since the 1980s to stake a claim to the liberal tradition. In The Era of the Individual, his densely argued “contribution to a history of subjectivity, ” Renaut seeks to provide a philosophical vindication of liberalism’ s fundamental premise and its controlling moral impulse.

But this is not precisely how Renaut would put it. Steeped in the tradition of continental rationalism that arises out of Descartes, that ascends through Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, and that undergoes radical criticism in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Renaut writes about the theoretical foundations of liberal modernity with a polemical flair and an air of grandiosity:

How are we to make sense of the presence in our intellectual universe of the assault on subjectivity as the root of totalitarian or technocratic enslavement, and the simultaneous appeal to subjectivity in describing and denouncing this enslavement as underlying a certain conception of humanity that is alien to the totalitarian world–a world in which human beings are denied any possibility (and thus any right) of being the source of their own thought and acts, of being subjects rather than objects (that is, the reified basis of an infinite manipulation).

This is not a book for the philosophically faint of heart. English- speaking readers may be intimidated by Renaut’s style, and if they happen to have been raised in the strait-laced tradition of analytic philosophy, they may be repelled by it. His initial articulation of the fundamental problem is certainly daunting:

The basic challenge facing modern society is to reconcile the “freedom of the moderns”–that is, the demand for independence implied by the modern idea of autonomy as independence from a radical otherness, or exteriority that prescribes the subject’s course of action–with the necessary existence of norms, which in constituting an unavoidable demand for intersubjectivity therefore presupposes a limitation upon monadological individualism–and so a limitation upon individuality.

Still, Renaut’s central thesis can be restated in an idiom that is faithful to his intention and brings out its pertinence to contemporary American debates.

In “our” terms, Renaut’s thesis might be put in this way: The defense of the dignity of the individual is a crowning achievement of modern thought. It is not, as so many of liberalism’s critics maintain, the irresistible fate of the modern defense of the dignity of the individual to culminate in a diabolical and doomed quest to subject the world to human mastery (as Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault all argue) or to deteriorate into an aimless individualism which confuses freedom with isolation and the liberation from regulation by any rules whatsoever (as Louis Dumont, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert Bellah and his co-authors of Habits of the Heart maintain).

To show that the modern individual can be understood in such a way as to avoid the dangers of “the reign of subjectivity” and the “triumph of individualism,” Renaut undertakes a “philosophical history of philosophy.” This differs from the sort practiced by professors of the history of political thought, which begins and ends with philological and historical concerns. Renaut does not begrudge such professors their interests or their labors. Indeed, he himself wishes to get the words right, to understand ideas in their contexts. Still, what animates his scholarly toil is the belief that a proper understanding of the thinking of the major figures in modern philosophy is crucial to a proper understanding of the truth about human nature; of the requirements of justice; of what we can hope for, and what we should fear from, politics today.

Renaut begins with Heidegger. This is right, not only because of the immense influence that Heidegger exercised over the French intellectuals who rose to prominence in the 1960s, but also because of the intrinsic power of Heidegger’s analysis of the trajectory of modernity. Heidegger argued that modernity in thought and politics is defined by the “turn, ” initiated above all by Descartes, toward subjectivity. The principle that man the subject constructs the reality that human beings inhabit implies that, behind custom and morality, underlying the laws of social and political life as well as the laws of nature, giving shape and substance to visions of the divine and conceptions of the ultimate principles of the cosmos, there is nothing but the organizing and productive capacities of the human mind.

The proposition that reality is a function of man’s mind, Heidegger argu