The Kingdom of Man

Rémi Brague, Paul Seaton

Description

Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this eagerly awaited English translation of Le Règne de l’homme, the last volume of Rémi Brague's trilogy on the philosophical development of anthropology in the West, Brague argues that, with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future. As scientific advances drained the cosmos of literal mystery, humanity increasingly devalued the theophilosophical mystery of being in favor of omniscience over one’s own existence. Brague narrates the intellectual disappearance of the natural order, replaced by a universal chaos upon which only humanity can impose order; he cites the vivid histories of the nation-state, economic evolution into capitalism, and technology as the tools of this new dominion, taken up voluntarily by humans for their own ends rather than accepted from the deity for a divine purpose.

Brague’s tour de force begins with the ancient and medieval confidence in humanity as the superior creation of Nature or of God, epitomized in the biblical wish of the Creator for humans to exert stewardship over the earth. He sees the Enlightenment as a transition period, taking as a given that humankind should be masters of the world but rejecting the imposition of that duty by a deity. Before the Enlightenment, who the creator was and whom the creator dominated were clear. With the advance of modernity and banishment of the Creator, who was to be dominated? Today, Brague argues, “our humanism . . . is an anti-antihumanism, rather than a direct affirmation of the goodness of the human.” He ends with a sobering question: does humankind still have the will to survive in an era of intellectual self-destruction? The Kingdom of Man will appeal to all readers interested in the history of ideas, but will be especially important to political philosophers, historical anthropologists, and theologians.

For a long time, modernity was not merely lived, but also conceived, as a project. Descartes wanted to entitle the Discourse on Method: “The project of a universal science that can raise our nature to its highest degree of perfection.” Nietzsche characterized his time as “the age of attempts.” Two centuries earlier, in one of his first works (1697), Daniel Defoe indicated that the fashion was all for projects, to the extent that one could call the time “the age of projects.” Above all he had in mind the speculations of transatlantic commerce, such as the one that had just ruined him, since commerce was “in its principle, all project, machination and invention.” In 1726, Jonathan Swift satirized the members of the Royal Society under the features of the distracted passengers of the flying island of Lagado, whom he ridiculed with the name of projectors, in that way also performing a self-critique because he confessed to having been “a sort of projector in his youth.” The embodiment of this type, after the Spanish arbitristas of the seventeenth century, was the Abbé de St. Pierre and his Project for rendering peace perpetual in Europe. However, in itself the word projector had nothing pejorative or ironic. One could claim it for oneself, as was the case with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to a more serious anthropology, man is a being who is not merely unrealized, but “projected.” Thus Fichte: “All the animals are fully developed and complete, man is but a sketch and a project.” Heidegger defined the life of Dasein as a “project,” then deepened the idea by making the project no longer a human initiative, but a fundamental trait of Being. Sartre took from it the definition of man, who “is nothing other than his project”; and contemporary ethicists conceive of the history of the individual as a “life-project.”

The word “project” is not without its teachings. Its Latin form does not correspond to a word in the Roman lexicon. The Romans knew the adjective projectus, with the meaning of “preeminent,” often with a pejorative nuance, “excessive.” But the substantive is not found in Antiquity. A pro-ject is above all what its etymology declares: a –ject (from jacere, to throw or toss), a movement in which the thing in motion (the “projectile”) loses contact with what set it in motion and pursues its trajectory. Ancient physics did not find a place for the phenomenon in its explanatory schemes, except by means of very implausible theories. Oddly enough, Modern Times, the age of pro-jects, are also the time when, in physics, one began to make –ject as such conceivable. Napoleon, the very type of modern man, i.e., “Faustian,” sensed this, he who compared himself to “a bit of stone thrown into space.” Three ideas fundamental to modernity can be derived from this master-image of –ject. A project implies 1) vis-à-vis the past, the idea of a new beginning which causes the forgetting of everything that preceded; 2) vis-à-vis the present, the idea of the autonomy of the acting subject; and 3) for the future, the idea of a supportive milieu that prolongs the action and assures its successful completion (Progress).

The modern project bears two faces turned in opposite directions, one towards below, to what is inferior to man, the other above, to what is superior to him.

Introduction

Part One: Preparation

1. The Best Of The Living Things

2. Domination

3. Three Incomplete Prefigurations

4. Metaphorical Dominations

5. The New Lord Of Creation

6. Attempts And Temptations

Part Two: Deployment

7. The Formation Of The Modern Project

8. The Beginnings Of The Realization

9. The Master Is There

10. Moral Dominion

11. The Duty To Reign

12. The Iron Rod

13. The New Meaning Of Humanism

14. The Sole Lord

Part Three: Failure

15. Kingdom or Waste Land?

16. Man, Humiliated

17. The Subjugated Subject

18. Man Remade

19. Man Surpassed and ... Replaced

20. Checkmate?

21. Lights Out

Conclusion

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• Political
• Modern
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Rene Descartes
• Modern history
• Politics
• Immanuel Kant
• B. F. Skinner
• Giovanni Maria Lancisi
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Enlightenment
• Henri de Lubac
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Emmanuel Kant
• Auguste Comte
• Francis Bacon

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268104283
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE KINGDOM OF MAN
CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD
O. Carter Snead, series editor
The purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is “Catholic” in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.
Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project
RÉMI BRAGUE
Translated by Paul Seaton
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Originally published as Le Règne de l’Homme: Genèse et échec du projet moderne . © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris 2015.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brague, Rémi, 1947- author.
Title: The kingdom of man : genesis and failure of the modern project / Rémi Brague ; translated by Paul Seaton.
Other titles: Règne de l’homme. English
Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Series: Catholic ideas for a secular world | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021922 (print) | LCCN 2018032921 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104276 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104283 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104252 (cloth) | ISBN 0268104255 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Philosophy, Modern. | Catholic Church—Doctrines.
Classification: LCC BD450 (ebook) | LCC BD450 .B642413 2018 (print) | DDC 128—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021922
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Contents
Translator’s Foreword
Preface
Introduction
PART 1 PREPARATION
1 The Best of the Living Things
2 Domination
3 Three Incomplete Prefigurations
4 Metaphorical Dominations
5 The New Lord of Creation
6 Attempts and Temptations
PART 2 DEPLOYMENT
7 The Formation of the Modern Project
8 The Beginnings of the Realization
9 The Master Is There
10 Moral Dominion
11 The Duty to Reign
12 The Iron Rod
13 The New Meaning of Humanism
14 The Sole Lord

PART 3 FAILURE
15 Kingdom or Wasteland?
16 Man, Humiliated
17 The Subjugated Subject
18 Man Remade
19 Man Surpassed and . . . Replaced
20 Checkmate?
21 Lights Out
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Translator’s Foreword
Rémi Brague is a scholar and a philosopher. As a philosopher, he thinks about the Big Three: God, the world, and the human. As a scholar, he reads an enormous amount, in multiple languages, ancient and modern, in order to think well about them. He thinks and reads so much that he tends to conceive of his projects in terms of trilogies. The Kingdom of Man is the culmination of one such trilogy.
The previous two works focused on antiquity and the Middle Ages, respectively, but did so in a distinctive way. The first focused on the discovery of “the world” as such, the kosmos , by the Greeks; the second on the biblical God, who called the ultimacy of the world in question, but who created it and saw it to be very good. 1 In both cases, human beings were measured by a superior instance, cosmos or Creator. But they also possessed great dignity as microcosm and as image and likeness of the Creator. To be human was a task and a great adventure, especially if one took seriously both vocations, as many did in the Middle Ages.
Now we come to modern times and to our world. Thanks to major thinkers, starting with Bacon and Descartes, the God/world/human relationship has been inverted. Modern humanity has long embarked upon the project of the conquest of nature by means of technological science, and God has become a private matter for those who have the inclination or need to believe, while publically he is more and more a persona non grata. And humanity’s dignity resides elsewhere than before: squarely in human beings themselves. “Rights,” “autonomy,” and “creativity” encapsulate a history of articulations of human dignity sans Dieu et contre le monde .

The foregoing is fairly well known. What does Brague add to it? A great deal. To begin with, a genealogical method or archaeology of concepts, requiring considerable erudition. “I employ the same method as in the first two works of the trilogy (admittedly implausible in its pretension): a history of ideas over the long run, which in principle encompasses the entirety of the course of history.” Ambitious, indeed! What one has here is a vast histoire raisonnée of a conceptual structure, what Brague entitles “the modern project.”
Because it is the focus of the investigation, he sketches its contours early on in the introduction. The sketch certainly catches the reader’s eye and whets his appetite for the argument to follow. It portrays a figure of human being who, on one hand, is totally cut off—who was designed to be cut off—from all authorities outside of himself, or his self. Cut off from any divine, to be sure, but from a normative nature as well. Time itself is cut in two: into a past that is simply repudiated and a present pregnant with a radiant future (“Progress”). On the other hand, the emancipation is the precondition for a great empowerment of human beings. As the Baconian title of the work indicates, the modern project is the technologically armed pursuit of the dominion of human beings over all things, including, paradoxically, their very humanity. Even more paradoxically, the technological dominance is the necessary means for the realization of their humanity. Assuredly, there is matter for reflection (and concern) in all this, and Brague does not fail to reflect on it, discreetly along the way and explicitly toward the end.
He does so in part by way of a dialogue with a twentieth-century Jesuit thinker, Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), who coined the phrase “atheistic humanism” in a book devoted to its analysis, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism (1944). In part prompted by de Lubac, in this work Brague discusses the full meaning and internal logic of this distinctive understanding of the human, which he calls “exclusive humanism.” According to Brague, the drama has played itself out to a point where one can see its necessary consequences. He does not mince words: among them is “the self-destruction of man,” the unwillingness to continue the human adventure and the inability to give reasons to do so. The contemporary European scene is exhibit A. In a little work he calls a “satellite” to this one, The Legitimacy of the Human , he provides “greater developments” of the argument, but even here the testimony of decidedly modern thinkers who are mute (and worse) before the existential questions—Is it good for human beings to exist? Is it legitimate? Should the human adventure continue, now that everything is subject to human choice?—powerfully supports the chilling conclusion. 2

In executing this ambitious archaeological project, Brague works at several levels. At the top, he attends to major thinkers, especially Bacon and Descartes and the German idealists, Kant and Fichte, but others such as Locke as well. Between and among them, the project of mastering nature and thereby fulfilling human nature was clearly conceptualized. Along the way, nature was reconceptualized (Brague focuses upon its ontological and moral “devaluation”), as was humanity itself. In fact, my use of “human nature” above was misleading. Quite what humanity is when divorced from teleological nature and a providentially ordered creation is a great question, one that Brague addresses head on. (Hint: humanity itself becomes “a project” and a “self-creation,” with the consequences alluded to above.)
Of course, none of the major thinkers worked in an intellectual vacuum. To begin with, Descartes read and developed Bacon, and Fichte, Kant. But their intellectual contexts were not only occupied by major thinkers; they were the recipients and transformers of the aggregate labors of lesser lights. And their ideas were refracted and transmitted by any number of other writers, including novelists and poets. All this is a second level of Brague’s ideational scholarship, where quite striking erudition is on display. “What hasn’t Brague read?” the reader will often ask.
In this group there are thinkers one may know—say, Auguste Comte or B. F. Skinner—and others one may not, such as the papal physician Giovanni Maria Lancisi, who in 1693 endorsed the experimental sciences in the domain of medicine, thus striking a blow for the new science against Aristotelianism. The mixture will vary for each reader. But all should be prepared for a tour de force of enormously wide-ranging, but still quite focused, scholarship, as Brague retraces the appearance of the intellectual materials that were forged into the conceptual components of the modern project. Once forged, the ideas were transmitted, refracted, and further developed, and Brague is a sure detective following this further trail. The mad ideas of Russian Soviet thinkers concerning human perfectability and mastery are but some of the many highlights—or revealing low-lights—of the subsequent investigation.
However, although it began and continued in the dom