11.4 Alan Ford

Appraisal Vol. 11 No. 4, Spring 2018
Article

ISSN 1358-3336

Modernity: No Place for Persons

Alan Ford

Abstract

My aim is to show how the implicit metaphysical background to modernity, commencing with Descartes and still in play today, must make the articulation of the ethical, and value in general, highly problematic, providing at best a strangled voice for their expression. This strangled voice is clearly represented by Wittgenstein’s attempt to articulate value, to say the unsayable, in his Tractatus, and I attempt to use this and other sources to sketch a ‘metaphysics of modernity’, which I see as a construct resulting from the key notions of subjectivity and objectivity on the one hand, and of form and contention the other. This creates four broad categories in which the notions of the ‘transcendental’ and the ‘factic’ (Sartre’s term) play crucial roles. I argue that this must result in an entirely illogical, and unnecessary mystification of the notions of value, the self and personhood, since there is no coherent place for such logically essential notions in this hidden metaphysics, which has slipped surreptitiously into our thinking, making important aspects of it basically irrational. I argue for a radical change in logical priorities, with the ethical in pole position.

Keywords

1. Introduction

In 1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein created a brilliant synthesis and presentation of the metaphysics that had begun with Descartes, and remain influential in one crucial aspect, until today. I am referring to the Tractatus. Of course, as he himself said, his real influences were Hume and Bertrand Russell. Yet these too, as well as virtually all philosophers up until then, including such widely divergent ones as Kant and Sartre, Nietzsche and Husserl, believed that Descartes’ distinction in his cogito was somehow fundamental: that the self was necessarily a thinker. It had all the credentials, it seemed, of intellectual respectability in that it was self-evident: if I think, then I must exist. No matter that this split mind from body and persons from each other in the issue of ‘other minds’. Self-evidence, like mathematics, must be true: and ever since, much of philosophy has accepted this premise as fundamental. OK, this is an exaggeration: since then PF Strawson and Wittgenstein himself (in the Investigations) and many Wittgensteinians have rejected much of this, but the arguments seem to me to be rather piecemeal. And because I have so little time I shall have to assume the above to be true, for the moment, look at the consequences in a limited instance (indicating that this distinction is irrational), and then, in a bit of philosophical fast-footwork, reveal a better model for the self, which overcomes problems for the ethical and values generally and banishes the relativism which our culture, because of this implicit metaphysics, insists on sinking into.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is essentially a description of what can be said and what can’t. Yet, unlike the Logical Positivists, who thought Wittgenstein was one of them and had consigned ethics to nonsense, he was attempting to find a place for values, and this part of the book, that could not be written, was the more important part. This place was at the limits of the world and language and, for this reason; values (ethics and aesthetics) must be passed over in silence. Yet I argue that there is no need for ethic’s strangled voice; and that ethics is necessarily of this world and has in fact a logical priority over factual terms. The Tractatus is a beautiful, eloquent and unnecessary mistake, based on modernity’s fundamental subjectivism.

Cartesian dualism would split into subjectivism or idealism on one side and objectivism (aka realism, materialism and positivism) on the other, and a battle as to which was the essence of the real ensued. Was the world fundamentally ideas, sensations (with objects actually constructs of mind in which solipsism would be the logical consequence); or matter, with mind as its function: as in Identity Theory’s ‘the mind is identical to the brain’?

Another fundamental distinction, which exercised all, was the Fact-Value split, made much of by Hume and embraced by so many afterwards, and upon which so much was based in the Tractatus in the form of what could be said (facts and logical statements) and what could not (values, ethics and art).

I shall use the Tractatus as a template to describe the implicit metaphysics of modernity, which have subliminally channelled its thinking, and then, all too briefly, point out that these distinctions, so fundamental to modernity, are misconceived and that a better model for the self and value is available, necessarily based on ethical relations between persons. This, I argue, gives a priority, in an interesting way, to value over fact.

But first to my model of modernity, which I see as a function of the distinctions: subject-object: value-fact; both characterised by their radical and, ex hypoth-esi, lack of relation between their items - subject and object; value and fact. This generates the following, reflected in the structure of the Tractatus:The collapse mentioned in the Factic section is actually anticipated at 5.64 where he says, after the comments about ‘metaphysical subject’, above:

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure

	Subject	Object
Value	The ‘Metaphysical Subject’, at the subjective ‘limits of the world’. ‘The subject does not belong to the world: rather it is a limit of the world’ (5.633) Like the eye, it cannot see itself (but it makes seeing and knowing possible) This Self shows itself by its absence, as in the cogito. It is transcendental in this sense, not of the world. Value lies at this subjective limit of the pure Self. ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world ... for all that happens and is the case is accidental’ (6.41) An expression of the Ideal or Transcendental Self.	The Metaphysical Other, at the limits of logic, or language, in the form of the tautology and the contradiction. We don’t examine the world to discover that the first is necessarily true and the second necessarily false. They show themselves to be so. Note: Values (?) of both kinds, like these ‘limits’, also show themselves. It has nothing to do with the facts – these are accidental. But they lie beyond science and mere logic, so neither of these can capture it. We have, essentially, a kind of mysticism. An expression of the Ideal or Transcendental Other. Value is revealed when one does not want to change the facts and lives according to what is the case, then one ‘will see the world aright’ (6.54.) But ‘[w]hat we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Fact	The ‘Factic’ Subject as a function of the world; the Psychological Self of conditioning. Its logical conclusion can be seen in Sartre’s Nausea, a horrific world and self of total determinism. Wittgenstein’s accidental, meaningless world, undistinguishable from the Factic Other.	The Factic Other, into which the Factic Self must collapse, for this is the world as seen by materialism, which has no distinction between self and other: all is one material fact – and ‘accidental’. ‘In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists ...’ (6.41)

realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.

Yet here we see that the collapse is general: the subjective flips into the object! In other words, within this subjectivist metaphysics, idealism (solipsism) collapses into its opposite – materialism, from its very start. This is hardly a basis for philosophy, but it’s been implicit for centuries in the West.

The Tractatus, like modernity when these implications are followed through, has no room for persons: it is an alien, personless terrain. Yet persons are not essentially thinkers; they are agents, as John Macmurray argued all those years ago. Thinking is a necessary aspect of a person, but it is not sufficient. Macmurray’s ‘form of the personal’ describes this:

The self is agent and exists only as agent. The self is subject but cannot exist as subject...
It can be subject only because it is agent...
The self is subject in and for the self as agent...
The self can be agent only by also being subject. (John Macmurray The Self as Agent, 100-102)

For Macmurray persons are essentially constituted in relation to other persons, where care is vital and things are done. I argue in addition that there is a logical priority of ethical relations over thought and logic itself, and that this is an implication of Macmurray’s thought.

Macmurray challenges the notion that a self is essentially a thinker in his ‘form of the personal’, outlined above, which prioritises the person as agent over the self as thinker. This form shows that the agent is the ‘positive’ which makes sense of the thinker, the ‘negative’, which is necessary, but not sufficient. This form appears everywhere, e.g. in the notion of context, which makes sense of statements in isolation. In both cases the ‘negative’ enriches and aids the self as agent, but outside of selfhood in relation there is nothing to enrich.

This comes over in his ‘rhythm of withdrawal and return’. The person withdraws into thought when, a la Heidegger, there is a problem in action. (Of course theoretical physics and mathematics seem to be outside this: but they too have the whole context of their histories, which gives them sense and motivation). Yet s/he returns to test the thought in the context of the real world. The world can then be enriched and action honed.

I shall end with a brief illustration of this in the personal world. Eleven-month-old Jane has been loved and feels secure. All seems well. Then Mum says ‘Come on, Janey, let’s see if you can walk’ and places her on her feet. Jane panics: she feels love has been withdrawn. She thinks: ‘Mum hates me, I hate her etc’. But when she either walks or falls the love is returned and she discovers that her paranoid thoughts are false and that what goes on in her head is not necessarily true. In this way she can distinguish between fantasy and reality according to the benchmark of in her own experience. This is an example of weaning, which seems to me to continue throughout life, as thought withdraws and returns to check itself with what is the case.

Yet to me this suggests that the context must be governed by the ethical if meaning is to be possible. If Jane’s Mum neglects her, there is no real return, no real trust, no benchmark established. The scientist who fakes his results commits a sin against science’s Holy Ghost. For thought to work it must have trust (would ‘faith’ be too strong?) in a real world. The alternatives would seem to be the psychopathic ‘I must get the boot in first’, or schizoid collapse, as thought withdraws into mere logical possibility. This suggests to me that thought and logic, both, are logically dependent on the ethical. It is the person in relation that stops the realm of logical possibility from collapsing into itself – and puts it to work. The flip stops there!

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Bibliography

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1961.

Cahoone, Lawrence

The Dilemma of Modernity, SUNY, 1988.

Macmurray, John

The Self as Agent, Faber & Faber, 1957.
Persons in Relation Faber & Faber, 1961.

Strawson, P. F.

‘Self, Mind and Body’ in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, Methuen, 1974.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Nausea Penguin Books, 1965.

Kierkegaard, Soren

‘The Sickness Unto Death’ inFear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death Princeton UP, 1968.

Catholic University of America Press presents:

An Introduction to Personalism

Juan Manuel Burgos

Much has been written about the great personalist philosophers of the 20th century – including Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein, Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla but few books cover the personalist movement as a whole. An Introduction to Personalism fills that gap. Juan Manuel Burgos shows the reader how personalist philosophy was born in response to the tragedies of two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s.

Through a revitalization of the concept of the person, an array of thinkers developed a philosophy both rooted in the best of the intellectual tradition and capable of dialoguing with contemporary concerns.

Our times are marked by numerous and often contradictory ideas about the human person. An Introduction to Personalism presents an engaging anthropological vision capable of taking the lead in the debate about the meaning of human existence and of winning hearts and minds for the cause of the dignity of every person in the 21st century and beyond.

Appraisal Vol. 11 No. 4, Spring 2018​​Article